Saturday, February 13, 2016

Bernie Sanders went
on demonstrations in the early 1960s, but then took a 50-year break until 2014.

So he skipped the
anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s movement and the other critical social
movements of his generation.

Now he supports
working people, but thinks its ok to bomb them in other countries.

And he’s for
democracy, but he supports monarchies and Israeli apartheid.

He’s for government
transparency, but wants Snowden to stand trial.

He’s independent,
but has always supported the corporate Democratic Party candidates.

He’s against police
violence, but thinks the police are a socialist institution.

He voted against the
Iraq War, but then voted to fund it.

He’s battling the
Washington establishment, but he’s a lifelong professional politician.

He’s against Hillary
Clinton, but has pledged to support her after she wins the primary.

He’s a democratic
socialist, but assures us he will not threaten capitalism.

And he has
proclaimed that his vote in Iowa was the beginning of a Political Revolution...

So - he’s getting
movement activists off the streets and signing them up to strengthen the
Democratic Party, a party that destroys progressive movements, so he can lead
the revolution that will end Democratic Party politics, in order to move to a
kind of socialism that preserves capitalism?

Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of
the most important public intellectuals of our time… He offers us new
ways of thinking about law, democracy and power. He allows us to reflect
upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we
least expect them.”
-Angela Davis

Revolutionary love,
revolutionary memory and revolutionary analysis are at work on every
page written by Mumia Abu-Jamal…His writings are a wake-up call. He is a
voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, livingly,
urgently. Black man, old-school jazz man, freedom fighter,
revolutionary—his presence, his voice, his words are the writing on the
wall.”
– Cornel West

“When you listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal you
hear the echoes of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois,
Paul Robeson, and the sisters and brothers who kept the faith with
struggle, who kept the faith with resistance.”
– Manning Marable

Writing
on the Wall presents a selection of more than 100 previously
unpublished essays spanning the entire period of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s
incarceration that crystallize his essential perspectives on community,
politics, protest, history, social change and movement organizing in the
U.S. and internationally. From discussions of Rosa Parks and Trayvon
Martin, to Martin Luther King and Edward Snowden, Abu-Jamal articulates
lucid, humorous, and often prescient insight into the past, present and
future of American politics and society.

This book and this
event could not be more timely, relevant and provocative.Presenting
Mumia’s thoughts and discussing them will be Angela Davis, Johann
Fernández, and Walter Turner.

Angela Davis is an American
political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a prominent
progressive activist and a leader in the Communist Party USA. She worked
with the Black Panther Party, and was heavily involved in America’s
Civil Rights Movement, particularly prisoner rights. She founded
Critical Reistance.

Johanna Fernández, the editor of Writing on
the Wall, is a former Fulbright Scholar to Jordan.Currently Assistant
Professor of History at City University of New York, she is the writer
and producer of the film Justice on Trial: The Case for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Professor Walter Turner, College of Marin Social Sciences
Professor, is also host and producer of the weekly Pacifica Radio
program Africa Today, airing Monday evenings on KPFA Radio 94.1FM.

KPFA benefit

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UNAC has joined with others in support of the following call to action for Feb. 13 - 21.
Oppose Islamophobia, Racism, Deportations and War

Unity and Solidarity Call to Action

In the name of all humanity we say:Yes to Unity, Solidarity, Justice and Peace!NO to hate and fear mongering.

We
will join together in a week of coordinated protests, February 13 – 21
across the country. Now is the time to organize in your community,
school or place of worship.
Stand with us against hate and persecution in all their manifestations.

The
corporate media and some politicians on both sides of the aisle believe
their interests can be advanced by scapegoating the poor and those
oppressed by racism, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant prejudice, mass
deportations, and the exclusion of refugees fleeing endless
U.S.-supported wars abroad.

Hate, fear mongering and war are
increasingly publicly promoted for heinous ends and especially to divide
the victims of the ever-deepening social cutbacks government austerity
policies inflict.

We say no to Islamophobia and all forms of
religious prejudice. We denounce the endless racist police murders of
unarmed members of the nation’s Black and poor communities. We reject
militarily-sealed borders and mass deportations of Latino people.

We strive for the unity and solidarity of all who cherish human and democratic rights.

Click to Endorse this Call:
http://unityandsolidarity.org/endorse-our-campaign/

For more information:
http://unityandsolidarity.org

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Sunday, March 20: National March

to Support Palestine in D.C.!

Momentum grows for the National March on D.C. to Support Palestine: Exciting confirmed speakers!
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Joe Catron
- American journalist who has spent years on the ground in Gaza
covering the brutal Israeli terrorist assaults against the Palestinian
people

On Sunday, March 20, 2016, there will be a major
National March on Washington, D.C., to support Palestine and the
Palestinian people. Stand with Palestine, say NO to the racist reign of
terror and the Apartheid Wall, and say YES to the right of Palestinian
refugees to return home.

Buses are being reserved and organized.
Transportation centers are being set up in cities up and down the East
Coast and in the Midwest. We expect people from every region to descend
on Washington, D.C.

The National March and Rally is timed to
coincide with the opening of the AIPAC Convention in downtown
Washington, D.C. We will gather in front of the White House for a rally
at 12 Noon. At 1:00 pm we will march to the D.C. Convention Center, the
site of the AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee)
conference.

Al-Awda, The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition
and the ANSWER Coalition are co-sponsoring the National March on March
20 (#‎SupportPalestineInDC2016). We are expecting hundreds of
organizations and individual leaders to endorse this activity and join
the effort!

What you can do:

Become an endorser of this important national action
RSVP at the bottom of this page
Sign up if you can help bring other people from your area to Washington on March 20
Palestine
is calling and the world must answer. International solidarity can make
the difference, as it did in bringing an end to apartheid in South
Africa. This must be a united effort for justice. We must stand together
to reject the efforts by the Israeli state and settlers to abuse,
violate and evict the Palestinian people. We say NO to racism and YES to
self-determination.

Please join and help bring thousands of people to Washington, D.C., on Sunday, March 20, 2016.

Free Palestine!

Read moreShare on FacebookShare on Twitter

1. Become an endorser of this important national action
http://www.answercoalition.org/endorse_the_national_march_to_support_palestine?utm_campaign=palestine_0108&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

3. Sign up if you can help bring other people from your area to Washington on March 20
http://www.answercoalition.org/organize_transportation_to_the_national_march_on_washington_to_support_palestine?utm_campaign=palestine_0108&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

Palestine
is calling and the world must answer. International solidarity can make
the difference, as it did in bringing an end to apartheid in South
Africa. This must be a united effort for justice. We must stand together
to reject the efforts by the Israeli state and settlers to abuse,
violate and evict the Palestinian people. We say NO to racism and YES to
self-determination.

Please join and help bring thousands of people to Washington, D.C., on Sunday, March 20, 2016.

General Motors is Guilty in Flint!

Demand GM, which made $9.7 billion in 2015, immediately contribute $4
billion to rebuild Flint’s water infrastructure, housing and schools,
and provide quality, lifetime healthcare and services for Flint’s youth!

Working people across the U.S. and even many celebrities have made
significant contributions to aid the people of Flint, who are
experiencing the devastating effects of the Water Lead Poisoning
Scandal. One entity, however, has been notably silent: General Motors
Corporation. This is despite the fact that it was the actions of GM that
are responsible for the financial destruction of Flint, which led to
the city being placed under racist Emergency Management with the
disastrous consequences that followed.

GM eliminated 72,000 union auto worker jobs in the Flint from 1970
to the present, driving out half of the population, and turning Flint
from one of the wealthiest cities in the U.S. to the poorest. GM moved
operations all over the globe seeking low wages and replaced workers
with robots in its drive for super-profits.

When GM became aware of the toxic nature of Flint’s water supply in
October 2014, it didn’t alert the public or call for the end of its use
in family water taps. No, it negotiated an exemption for itself to get
water from Lake Huron so its parts would not be corroded, the people be
damned.

GM is the single greatest polluter of the toxic Flint River, using it to dump industrial waste for years.

GM promoted lead-based gasoline for 60 years to make its engines
more efficient at the least cost, knowing full well the poisonous
effects of lead.

GM got a bailout from the federal government in 2009 which cost
taxpayers $11 billion. The State of Michigan, under governors Granholm
and Snyder, gave GM $4 billion in tax credits through 2030, meaning
every year GM is profitable it pays ZERO state taxes.

GM pocketed $9.7 billion in profits in 2015. It’s time for GM to pay its debt to the people of Flint.

For more info: 313-680-5508http://moratorium-mi.org/demonstrate-demand-gm-pay-4-billion-to-flint/

The
PA Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed legal action to remove
Corey Walker’s attorney, Rachel Wolkenstein, in November 2014. On
Tuesday, February 9, 2016 the evidentiary hearing to terminate
Wolkenstein as Corey Walker’s pro hac vice lawyer continues before Judge
Lawrence Clark of the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas in
Harrisburg, PA.

Walker, assisted by Wolkenstein, filed
three sets of legal papers over five months in 2014 with new evidence
of Walker’s innocence and that the prosecution and police deliberately
used false evidence to convict him of murder. Two weeks after
Wolkenstein was granted pro hac vice status, the OAG moved against her
and Walker.

The OAG claims that Wolkenstein’s political
views and prior legal representation of Mumia Abu-Jamal and courtroom
arrest by the notorious Judge Albert Sabo makes it “intolerable” for her
to represent Corey Walker in the courts of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania.

Over the past fifteen months the OAG has
effectively stopped any judicial action on the legal challenges of Corey
Walker and his former co-defendant, Lorenzo Johnson against their
convictions and sentences to life imprisonment without parole while it
proceeds in its attempts to remove Wolkenstein.

This is
retaliation against Corey Walker who is innocent and framed. Walker and
his attorney won’t stop until they thoroughly expose the police
corruption and deliberate presentation of false evidence to convict
Corey Walker and win his freedom.

This outrageous
attack on Corey Walker’s fundamental right to his lawyer of choice and
challenge his conviction must cease. The evidence of his innocence and
deliberate prosecutorial frame up was suppressed for almost twenty
years. Corey Walker must be freed!

“This conference that we are picketing ... is an obscene reflection of the reality of this country today, that the most important thing is money and profit, and not human needs!”- Carole Seligman,Speaking at the demonstration

It
was in their fancy tailored suits and with suspicious eyes that Big
Pharma CEO’s and investors got interrupted by protestors and speeches
such as the above, as they came and went from the (too-big-to-fail) JP
Morgan-sponsored conference on “health care” (read: profit care) at the
elite Westin St. Francis hotel on Union Square in San Francisco on
Monday, the 11th of January 2016.

Public Health Not Corporate Wealth!

Called
out by the OASIS Clinic, a not-for-profit in Oakland CA that
specializes in treating patients with Hepatitis-C, the demonstration was
organized in collaboration with the Labor Action Committee To Free
Mumia Abu-Jamal (LAC) and supported by numerous other groups. Some 70
protestors, including OASIS staff, patients and medical professionals,
marched outside the hotel, as the pharmaceutical investors came and
went, to demand proper treatment for the 3 million victims of Hep-C in
the US, including 700,000 prisoners; and to give the CEOs a warning: we
are watching! Profiteering must stop!

As Carole Seligman,
speaking for Prison Radio and Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal explained, “We know how to feed people who are starving, and
we know how to cure people with hepatitis-C and Aids and many other
diseases, but ... this obscene conference (is about) not how to cure
people, not how to distribute these life saving drugs, but how to make
money! This is obscene... we know how to do it! It does not involve
profit-making!”

Gilead Charges 100 Times It’s Cost for the Hep-C Cure

The
big pharma company Gilead Sciences (based in Foster City, CA) was a
chief target of this action. Gilead is the owner and manufacturer (but
not the developer--that was a company that Gilead bought) of the new
drug, Harvoni, which has a 95 percent cure rate for Hep-C in a 12 (or
more) week treatment of one pill per day. This is a vast improvement
over the previous treatments for Hep-C, but... Gilead charges the
outrageous price of $1,000 per pill for the drug, which costs from
$84,000 to nearly $100,000 for a full curative treatment, or more than
twice what the developing company’s suggested price was. Gilead charges
about 100 times the cost of production of the pill!

We
thought we had induced some indigestion, and sure enough, we had! We
were told by one journalist covering the conference that the
demonstration had really shaken them up. Reaction inside the conference
was immediate. Of course, we (protestors & patients) weren’t allowed
in to hear this, but according to the report, “Drug Makers Dismiss
Outrage Over High Prices As ‘Abomination’,” from Stat News (12 January),
because of our demonstration...

“(It) wasn’t surprising that
during a panel discussion here Monday, a Gilead executive was asked how
he lives with himself. Gregg Alton, the [Gilead Sciences] executive
vice president for corporate and medical affairs, joked that he goes
running. Then his tone turned serious as he talked about research,
innovation, and the value of life-saving new drugs. ‘I sleep quite
well,’ he concluded.”

Anger At Drug Companies is Called ... an “Abomination!”

Even
more outrageous was the following from a conference participant:
“Public anger at drug companies is ‘an abomination’”! The speaker was
Ron Cohen, chairman of the big industry group BIO (allegedly “the
world’s largest biotechnology trade association” https://www.bio.org).
All the talk about pharma profiteering is “a perversion of reality,”
according to Cohen.

Protest is an abomination?! Anger over big
pharma profiteering is a perversion of reality?! The truth is millions
of Hep-C sufferers are being denied the curative treatment because they
cannot afford it, or their health plans refuse to cover it due to its
cost; or because they are prisoners--Mumia Abu-Jamal among them--who are
denied it because prison administrations refuse to supply it until they
are deathly sick! This is an abomination! Health care for all is a
right, but not for these greed-driven big corporate executives!

“Eye-Popping” Price Tags:Big Pharma Price Gouging Runs Amok!

Many
drug makers besides Gillead--Pfizer, Ely Lilly, Amgen, Allergan and
Vanda Pharmaceuticals, among many others--have raised prices recently,
according to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. “And a slew
of new drugs have hit the market with eye-popping price tags: cancer
drugs at more than $11,000 a month; cholesterol drugs at more than
$14,000 a year,” according to the Stat News piece. “Then there’s Martin
Shkreli, the pharma executive who bought up a decades-old drug and hiked
the price 5,000 percent, turning himself into a target of nationwide
protests before he was arrested last month on securities fraud charges.”
(http://www.statnews.com/2016/01/12/public-outrage-drug-prices/)

All
this comes in addition to the already over-the-top high drug prices in
the profit-driven US “health” system, which is more costly than in
virtually any other country! As protest coordinator Jack Heyman pointed
out, “Shrekli should have been arrested for profiteering. But in
capitalist America, profiteering is not illegal.” Where is the
perversion, if not in this system, in which profit is god, and the rest
of us--the working masses--are sacrificed on the altar of corporate
greed?!

Mumia’s Radio Commentary, “Medications for the Money, Not
Patients,” 06 January 2016, deals with the outrageous profiteering of
Gilead Sciences in its pricing for the Hepatitis-C cure. The commentary
was to have been played at the rally, but technical difficulties
prevented it. It can be heard on the Prison Radio site, at:
http://www.prisonradio.org/media/audio/mumia/medications-money-not-patients-221-mumia-abu-jamal

Our Demonstration Was Fired Up

Speakers,
besides Carole Seligman, included Dr Dianne Sylvestre, Executive
Director, and Orlando Chavez and Ana Turetsky of the OASIS Clinic; Dick
Becker of the ANSWER Coalition, which provided the sound system; Gerald
Sanders of the Oscar Grant Committee; Marsha Feinland of the Peace and
Freedom Party; and Robin Roth of the Hep-C Task Force of SF. The Single
Payer Now group, along with numerous others also supported this
demonstration with their signs and banners. Jack Heyman, ILWU
longshoreman (retired) and member of both the Labor Action Committee To
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, led
the demonstration. A video by Labor Video Project can be viewed at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8i7pCEMScw

Angela Davis’ Comment

Former political prisoner Angela Davis, who was on a speaking tour, sent the following message to the demonstration:

“It
is more important than ever to join the campaign both to free Mumia and
to protest the fact that capitalist profit is ranked as far more
important than human health. Mumia ‘s health situation demands that we
take action immediately. As we know, Mumia has Hepatits C – along with
10,000 other prisoners in Pennsylvania and approximately 500,000 all
over the U.S. They are not receiving treatment because the
pharmaceutical companies producing drugs that are capable of curing Hep C
value profit over human health. "Mumia continues to struggle
against [the] prison industrial complex and the larger capitalist
system. It is up to us to Free Mumia and to eventually abolish the
prison industrial complex Free Mumia Free Them all!”

No Execution By Medical Mistreatment!

Mumia
Abu-Jamal, the world’s best-known political prisoner, like 10,000
prisoners in Pennsylvania (where Mumia is incarcerated for a crime he
did not commit), and at least 700,000 other US prisoners, suffers from a
debilitating Hepatitis-C infection which is not being properly treated
by prison administrations.

The LAC’s signs saying “No Execution
By Medical Mistreatment,” referred to the fact that the Pennsylvania
police/prison complex have been trying to kill Mumia since 1981, when
they found him, and shot him almost fatally at a crime scene with which
he had no involvement! On death row and beyond, the authorities have
been trying to kill Mumia. Hugo “Yogi Bear” Pinell, one of the longest
serving and most brutally treated political prisoners in the US, was set
up and murdered in 2015. This is what they are trying to do to Mumia
now, by medical mistreatment, and if that fails, by other means! Mumia
must be freed from prison!

Support the Prison Radio Legal Fund for Mumia’s Case!

The
LAC linked this struggle with the potentially precedent-setting court
case of Mumia versus the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
(Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes), which seeks injunctive relief for immediate
treatment with the new (Harvoni) curative medication for Hepatitis-C.
Currently, Mumia is being treated with a bogus heat-lamp therapy for his
painful body-wide skin inflammation, while being denied treatment for
the hepatitis, which is the cause of this and all his symptoms.

Mumia
is the first one to point out that prisoners throughout the US are,
like him, not being properly treated for this debilitating and always
fatal disease. A victory for Mumia in this suit could extend a precedent
throughout the prison system. The lawyers for Mumia in this case are
supported through a fund organized by Prison Radio, the organization
which publishes Mumia’s regular commentaries. We urge you to help! Go to
www.prisonradio.org for more information, and to donate.

Mumia Must Be Free!

Like
so many other prisoners, Mumia needs to receive the life-saving cure
for Hep-C. And, as an innocent political prisoner, framed for a crime he
did not commit, he must be free. But like Leonard Peltier and other
political prisoners who are targeted by the state at all its levels,
from local police through state and national politicians and the Justice
Department itself, Mumia needs a mass mobilization and workers’
struggle to free him from this unjust incarceration. In 1995 masses
mobilized to stop the planned execution of Mumia, and in 1999, Oakland
teachers, and West Coast longshore workers set an example by conducting
labor actions to free Mumia, which included the shutting down of all
West Coast ports! Today, with Mumia’s life at stake, labor and the
community need to build a mass mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Public Health, Not Corporate Wealth!No Execution By Medical Mistreatment!Free and Proper treatment for All Hep-C Prisoners Now!Jail Drug Profiteers, Not Mumia!Mumia Is Innocent! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

This message is from:
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.laboractionmumia.org.
January 2016

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, THE Bureau of Prisons, The Governor of Georgia

We are aware of a review being launched of
criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly
convicted and or deserve a new trail because of flawed forensic evidence
and or wrongly reported evidence. It was stated in the Washington Post
in April of 2012 that Justice Department Officials had known for years
that flawed forensic work led to convictions of innocent people. We
seek to have included in the review of such cases that of Imam Jamil
Abdullah Al-Amin. We understand that all cases reviewed will include
the Innocence Project. We look forward to your immediate attention to
these overdue wrongs.
ASAP: The Forgotten Imam Project
P.O. Box 373
Four Oaks, NC 27524

"AMERICA'S
PARADISE" HAS BEEN THEIR HELL, 44 YEARS OF POLITICAL IMPRISONMENT, THE
PAST 15 OF THEM WITHOUT EVEN THE PRETENSE OF THEM SERVING SENTENCES

While the U.S. today
declares that the natural inhabitants of the Virgin Islands have "no
fundamental rights," it claims that it fairly tried these men in 1972,
then held them in the U.S. federal prison system for 29 years. In 2000,
even though the U.S. retired their "sentences," it directed the
colonial government to hold them nonetheless, indefinitely, and
illegally, and this is exactly what it has done for 15-years.

FOR RAISING THE FACT THEY HAVE BEEN
ILLEGALLY HELD FOR THE PAST 15-YEARS BY THE u.s. COLONIAL GOVERNMENT
THEY WERE LOCKED DOWN AS "SECURITY RISKS." THIS IS SPITE OF YEARS OF
THEM GOING OUTSIDE THE PRISON TO COMMUNITY EVENTS WITHOUT ESCORT AS
INVITED QUEST SPEAKERS AND HAD IN FACT, HAD JUST RETURNED FROM ONE. tHIS
ACTION TOOK PLACE aT THE VERY TOME THAT THE COURT WAS TO HAVE ACTED ON
THEIR HABEAS PETITIONS. oN THE DAY THEY SHOULD HAVE FREED, THEY ARE PUT
IN THE WHOLE AND REMAIN THERE TO THIS DAY. tO DATE, IN UTTER VIOLATION
OF THE LAW, THE u.s. dISTRICT COURT HAS WITHHELD PROCESS, IN VIOLATION
OF THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS AS WELL.

WHO ARE THE VIRGIN ISLAND 3

THE VIRGIN ISLAND 3, FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE “VIRGIN ISLAND 5,” HAVE BEEN
IMPRISONED FOR 43-YEARS FOR THE KILLING OF SEVEN WHITES AND A MULATTO AT
THE FOUNTAIN VALLEY GOLF COURSE IN ST. CROIX IN 1972. EVEN THOUGH THE
INCIDENT WAS DESCRIBED AS A “ROBBERY GONE BAD,” THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
TREATED IT AS THE TIP OF SOME SORT OF “MAU MAU” UPRISING TO FORCE ALL
WHITE PEOPLE OUT OF THE ISLES. IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE INCIDENT THE
U.S. SENT IN AN ARMY OF RACIST WHITE FBI AGENTS, ALONG WITH 300 MARINES,
AND PLACED ALL OF THE ISLES IT CLAIMS TO “OWN” UNDER A STATE OF RACIST
MARTIAL LAW. THE ENTIRE BLACK POPULATION WAS SUSPECT, PARTICULARLY
YOUNG BLACK MEN, WITH OVER 100 OF THEM BEING ROUNDED UP IN HOUSE TO
HOUSE SEARCHES. MOST OF THE YOUNG MEN WERE SUBJECTED TO VARIOUS FORMS OF
TORTURE THAT INCLUDED BEATINGS, WATER-BOARDING, ELECTRIC SHOCK, AND
BEING HUNG FROM TREES AND BUILDINGS BY THEIR FEET. (for a more detailed
account click this link "Maracatu")

WITHIN A WEEK AFTER THE INCIDENT THE FBI SETTLED ON FIVE YOUNG MEN AS
THE CULPRITS WITH SCANT EVIDENCE AND "CONFESSIONS" OBTAINED THROUGH
TORTURE. THOSE FIVE YOUNG BLACK MEN WHERE ISHMAEL LABEET, RAPHAEL
JOSEPH, WARREN BALLENTINE, BEAUMONT GEREU, AND MERAL SMITH. THEY WERE
QUICKLY TRIED TOGETHER IN THE U.S. DISTRICT COURT BY A JUDGE WHO USED TO
SERVE AS THE ATTORNEY FOR THE ROCKEFELLER FAMILY, WHICH OWNED THE GOLF
COURSE. THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE TO CONVICT A ONE, WHICH WAS WHY THE
STRATEGY WAS TO TRIE THEM TOGETHER, IN ORDER TO FUDGE THE FACTS. THE GUN
USED TO KILL THE PEOPLE WAS AN AUTOMATIC RIFLE REGISTERED TO THE VI
POLICE DEPARTMENT, BUT NO POLICE OFFICER WAS EVER MADE SUSPECT. THE
ASSAILANTS WERE MASKED THE ENTIRE TIME AND THE INCIDENT OCCURRED IN A
MATTER OF MINUTES WITH THE ASSAILANTS ALLEGEDLY DISAPPEARING BACK INTO
THE SURROUNDING RAIN FORREST FROM WHICH THEY CAME. HOWEVER, SOME
WITNESSES REPORTED THAT THE MEN DROVE OFF IN A CAR AND THAT THE INCIDENT
WAS SOME SORT OF "HIT."

AFTER A HASTY TRIAL, WHEN THE JURY INFORMED THE JUDGE THAT THEY COULD
NOT CONVICT, HE ORDERED THEM HELD FOR NINE DAYS UNTIL THEY CAME BACK
WITH GUILTY VERDICTS AGAINST ALL FIVE. WITHIN THE HOUR AFTER GETTING THE
GUILTY VERDICTS THE JUDGE HAD ALL FIVE BROUGHT BEFORE HIM AND SENTENCED
EACH TO EIGHT CONSECUTIVE LIFE SENTENCES, THEN HAD THEM MARCHED FROM
THE COURTHOUSE DOWN TO THE HARBOR IN CHRISTENSTED. IN THE HARBOR WERE A
NUMBER OF SEA PLANES THAT THEN FLEW THE FIVE OFF TO FEDERAL PRISONS IN
THE UNITED STATES. THE SPEEDY ARREST, TRIAL, CONVICTION, AND
IMPRISONMENT WERE INTENDED TO SEND A MESSAGE TO THE NATURAL INHABITANTS
AGAINST EVEN CONTEMPLATING OPPOSING U.S. RULE, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME TO
ENSURE WHITES THAT ANY BLACK UPRISING WOULD BE DEALT WITH QUICKLY,
HARSHLY, AND EFFECTIVELY. THE
QUICK ARREST, PROSECUTION, TRIAL, CONVICTIONS, HARSH SENTENCES, AND
QUICK EXECUTION AMOUNTED TO A LYNCHING IN ORDER TO TERRORIZE THE NATURAL
INHABITANTS. AND THIS IS WHY THESE MEN REMAIN IMPRISONED TO THIS DAY,
IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN THAT TERROR MESSAGE.

iN 1983, WHILE BEING TRANSPORTED BACK TO PRISON IN THE STATES AFTERAPPEARING
BACK IN ST. CROIX FOR A COURT HEARING, , ISHMAEL LABEET HIJACKED THE
PLANE AND ESCAPED TO CUBA WHERE HE WAS GIVEN POLITICAL ASYLUM AND LIVES
TODAY. IN 1992, RAPHAEL JOSEPH ALONE WAS PARDONED BY THE GOVERNOR FOR
GOOD BEHAVIOR, EVEN THOUGH HIS BEHAVIOR WAS NOT ANY BETTER THAN THE
OTHER THREE.

IN 2000-01, ALTHOUGH THE U.S. FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS RETIRED THE
SENTENCES OF THE REMAINING THREE AND DISCHARGED THEM FROM ITS CUSTODY,
IT DID NOT RELEASE THEM FROM DETENTION. INSTEAD OF BEING RELEASED AS
REQUIRED BY LAW, THE THREE WERE ILLEGALLY "TRANSFERRED" TO THE CUSTODY
OF THE COLONIAL GOVERNMENT, EVEN THOUGH THEY NO LONGER HAD SENTENCES.

FOR THE PAST 15-YEARS THESE MEN HAVE BEEN DETAINED WITHOUT EVEN THE
PRETENSE OF A PRISON SENTENCE, HELD BY A GOVERNMENT IMPOSED AND
CONTROLLED BY A FOREIGN POWER - THE UNITED STATES. THIS GOES TO PROVE
THAT FROM THE VERY OUTSET THEIR IMPRISONMENT WAS POLITICAL AND ILLEGAL,
THESE MEN WERE MADE "TERROR SUSPECTS" 30-YEARS BEFORE GOERGE BUSH AND
DICK CHENEY MADE THE TERM UP. jUST LIKE MANY OF THE SO-CALLED "TERROR
SUSPECTS" AT GUANTANAMO BAY, THIS MEN WERE SWEPT UP IN A WARLIKE U.S.
INVASION OF THEIR COUNTRY. AND JUST LIKE WAS DONE TO THE SO-CALLED
"TERROR SUSPECTS" AT GUANTANAMO BAY, THESE MEN WERE ALSO SUBJECTED TO
"ENHANCED INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES," OR TORTURE. AND JUST LIKE WITH THE
SO-CALLED "TERROR SUSPECTS" AT GUANTANAMO BAY THEIR CONTINUED DETENTION
IS OUTSIDE OF ALL KNOWN LAW AND MORALITY.

MALIK,
HANEEF, AND ABDUL CAN BE REACHED BY MAIL AT THE GOLDEN GROVE PRISON, IF
IN FACT THEY ARE STILL THERE AND NOT BEEN SPIRITED OFF TO SOME OTHER
"BLACK SITE:"

RURAL ROUTE 1, BOX 9955, KNGSHILL VI OO8500

HOWEVER, PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT THERE IS NO INTENT TO JUST LET THEM
TO CONTINUE TO HOLD THEM, WE ARE NOT GOING TO WAIT FOR JUSTICE TO COME
FROM A PLACE WERE IT DOES NOT EXIST. WE HAVE WORK TO DO IN THE ISLES
RIGHT NOW. YOU CAN HELP, PLEASE FOLLOW THE PEOPLE'S ALERT BELOW. THANK
YOU

PEOPLES' ALERT:

ON DECEMBER 31, 2015, THE VIRGIN ISLAND 3 WERE LOCKED DOWN FOR
PETITIONING THE U.S. DISTRICT COURT OF THE VIRGIN ISLANDS, THE SAME
COURT IN WHICH THEY WERE "TRIED" 44-YEARS AGO, TO END 15-YEARS OF BEING
ILLEGALLY DETAINED BY THE COLONIAL GOVERNMENT OF THE "U.S. VIRGIN
ISLANDS." INSTEAD OF DUE PROCESS, INSTEAD OF JUSTICE, THEY HAVE BEEN
SUBJECTED TO MORE OPPRESSION AND REPRESSION

Kenneth Mapp is the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, a former
police officer in the states, is directly responsible for the illegal
detention of the Virgin Islands 3. All he does not need a court to
order their release, all he needs to do is to decide that his
government will no long violate the law and the Human Rights of its own
people.

Read more at: http://virginislands3.yolasite.com/

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Afrikan
Black Coalition just started a petition to the University of California
Regents, UC President Napolitano, and UC Chief Investment Officer
Bachher stating:

Last year, we
pushed the University of California to divest $25 million in private
prison shares. We dedicate this victory to the millions of our people
languishing in America's mass incarceration regime. But the University
of California still has not divested the $425 million in shares from
Wells Fargo, one of the largest private prison funders.

Wells
Fargo maintains a $900 million credit line to private prisons. If we all
truly believe that #BlackLivesMatter from the hood to the academy, we
must stand with our family and friends who are currently incarcerated or
are at a higher risk of incarceration because of their very Blackness.

Tell the UC to divest effective immediately, all of the $425 million it has currently invested in Wells Fargo!

We
just started a petition titled "University California (UC) Divestment."
Below is the appeal that we will deliver to the University of
California next month:

We, the undersigned community members and
justice seekers, are excited by the Afrikan Black Coalition's recent
victory in getting the University of California to divest $25 million
from the private prison corporations Corrections Corporations of America
(CCA), The Geo Group, and G4S. The victory was historic because private
prisons have exacerbated America's mass incarceration regime, are
implicated in gross human rights violations, and should be outlawed.

However,
we share the Afrikan Black Coalition's outrage and frustration
resulting from the UC system's startling $425 million investment in
Wells Fargo, one of the largest financiers of private prisons. According
a report from Enlace, Wells Fargo acts as a syndication agent and
issuing lender on CCA's $900 million line of credit. As of their latest
filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Wells Fargo owned
998,350 shares in CCA and 462,342 shares in GEO Group, nearly 1.5
million shares total. It bears noting that Wells Fargo is a bank that
practiced discriminatory lending and maneuvered people of color
(primarily Black and Latino) into subprime mortgages that led to the
financial meltdown of 2007-2008; and in response to accusations of
racial discrimination in its lending practices, Wells Fargo settled for
$175 million in 2012 with pending litigations from several U.S cities
about discriminatory practices.

I share the Afrikan Black
Coalition's outrage and frustration resulting from the UC system's
startling $425 million investment in Wells Fargo, one of the largest
financiers of private prisons.

It is for these reasons that we
stand in solidarity with the Afrikan Black Coalition in its call for
justice for those who are systematically dehumanized by an unforgiving
and unfair judicial system that continues to criminalize Black and brown
bodies. We acknowledge these cases illustrate the evolution of
America's legal institution to uphold race, gender, and class
hierarchies. By investing in Wells Fargo Bank, the University of
California is actively supporting a legacy of historical emphasis on
profit margins at the expense of human beings, and the continued mass
criminalization of Black existence. It is an ethical embarrassment and a
clear disregard for Black and immigrant lives for the UC to invest
hundreds of millions of dollars in Wells Fargo as a financier of private
prisons. In the age of Black Lives Matter and a reinvigorated Black
Freedom Struggle, the UC should NOT be bankrolling the inhuman mass
incarceration regime that has gripped America.

I am outraged that
Wells Fargo spends almost $1 billion funding modern-day slave
plantations. The University of California should not be in business with
such an immoral bank!
In Solidarity and Struggle,

SUPPORTERS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL,AND FREE QUALITY HEALTH CARE FOR ALL:The
Oasis Clinic in Oakland, CA, which treats patients with Hepatitis-C
(HCV), demands an end to the outrageous
price-gouging of Big Pharma corporations, like Gilead Sciences, which
hike-up the cost for essential, life-saving medications such as the cure
for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, in order to reap huge profits. The
Oasis Clinic’s demand is:

URGENT UPDATE: PA JUDGE IMMEDIATELY DISMISSED MAJOR TILLERY'S LAWSUIT AS "FRIVOLOUS." MAJOR WILL FIGHT THIS IN FEDERAL COURT!

MAJOR TILLERY SUES PA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

First Amendment Lawsuit Against Retaliation For Fighting for Medical Treatment For Mumia Abu-Jamal and All Prisoners

Major Tillery, his daughter, Kamillah and his two granddaughters:

Major
Tillery filed a civil rights lawsuit pro se against John Wetzel,
Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC), SCI
Mahanoy Superintendent John Kerestes, SCI Frackville Superintendent
Brenda Tritt and 17 other prison officials. The DOC punished and
retaliated against Tillery for acts of solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal
and other prisoners fighting for the fundamental human right of medical
care. The lawsuit was filed in the Schuylkill County Court of Common
Please on January 5, 2015:This
is a civil rights action brought by Major George Tillery, a 65 year-old
African-American man to stop and remedy retaliation against him for his
exercise of his First Amendment Rights. Tillery was subjected to
numerous retaliatory acts by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
and its employees, including medical neglect and medical mistreatment,
unjustified cell searches, transfer to another cell block, loss of his
prison job and precipitous transfer from SCI Mahanoy to SCI Frackville
and then being set-up with a false misconduct and given over four months
in disciplinary custody (solitary confinement).

This
retaliation was intended to punish and stop Tillery from filing
grievances challenging medical neglect and mistreatment of him and other
prisoners, including the well-known journalist and former death row
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. This retaliation was punishment for Tillery
continuing to publicly advocate for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and to publicly
expose the DOC’s neglect and mistreatment of prisoner’s medical problems
as well as the DOC’s retaliation against Tillery; and continuing to
file grievances objecting to these retaliatory actions by prison
officials.

Throughout his over thirty years in prison serving a
sentence of life without parole, Tillery has challenged his conviction
and sentence, and unconstitutional restrictions on access to courts,
prison conditions including security classification and placement
procedures, medical treatment, and housing conditions on behalf of
himself and other prisoners. He was held in solitary confinement in
super-max institutions in the federal and Pennsylvania prison systems
for over twenty of those years.

Tillery was the lead plaintiff
in Tillery v. Owens, a class action lawsuit filed July 23, 1987,
challenging the constitutionality of the conditions of confinement at
the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh ("SCIP") located in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It started as a pro se legal action by
Tillery. It resulted in an historic legal order requiring remediation of
unconstitutional prison conditions including deficient security, fire
protection, access to the courts, over-crowded housing, medical care,
mental health care and dental services. The DOC was required to make
prison renovations costing more than a million dollars. See Tillery v.
Owens, 719 F.Supp. 1256 (W.D.Pa.1989).

Major Tillery demands
that the DOC stop its retaliation, remove the false misconduct from his
record, provide medical treatment and transfer him out of SCI Frackville
to a different prison in eastern Pennsylvania so he remains near his
family.

This lawsuit is just part of Major Tillery’s fight for
medical care and to protect himself and other prisoners who are standing
up for justice. He has liver disease and chronic Hepatitis C that the
DOC has known about for over a decade. Tillery is filing grievances
against the prison and its medical staff to get the new antiviral
medicine. This is part of the larger struggle to obtain Hep C treatment
for the 10,000 prisoners in Pennsylvania and the estimated 700,000
prisoners nationally who have Hepatitis-C and could be cured.

Major Tillery’s daughter, Kamilah Iddeen appeals for our support:

It
is so important that my Dad filed this lawsuit– it shows what really
goes on inside the prison. Prison officials act as if my father is their
property, that his family doesn’t exist, that he isn’t a man with
people who love him. They lied to us every time we called and said he
needed treatment. They lied and said he hadn’t told them, that he hadn’t
filed grievances. The DOC plays mind games and punishes prisoners who
stand up for themselves and for others. But my Dad won’t be broken.

The
DOC needs to learn they can’t do this to a prisoner and his family.
Justice has to be done. Justice has to be served. Please help.

Call prison officials and demand:--Demand decent medical care for Major Tillery!--Stop
the Retaliation Against Major Tillery. He should be exonerated for the
false charges of drug possession and this misconduct removed from his
record.--Transfer Major Tillery from SCI Frackville back to SCI
Mahanoy or to another facility in eastern Pennsylvania to remain near
his family.Dept. Of Corrections SecretaryJohn Wetzel (717) 728-4109 Superintendent SCI FrackvilleBrenda Tritt (570) 874-4516

Defend Chelsea Manning

Here are two important ways you can support Chelsea:

Attorneys Nancy Hollander and
Vincent Ward are well into the process of preparing for Chelsea's first legal appeal next
year. The appeals process has the potential to take decades off Chelsea's 35 year prison sentence.Donate Today!

Super secret insider info: Not only are Chelsea Manning shirts and stuff already 50% off in our online store, if you use discount code "chelsea"
during check out, you'll get an additional 50% off. That is insane, so
please don't tell anyone else, as we can't afford for this news to get
out too broadly. Here's the link to the store, just for you Bonnie.

Chelsea honored in Advocate's 40 under 40!

"In blogs, tweets, and handwritten letters from prison, the former Army
intelligence specialist is still trying to change the world."

"I often hear and read that many people all over the world consider me a
‘whistleblower’ or a ‘heroine.’ This experience can be a little
intimidating at times," she tells The Advocate. "That’s an idea
that would be a lot to live up to! I don’t feel like I can live up to
the expectations of being a ‘heroine.’ I don’t have any special powers
or abilities like a comic book super hero. I actually feel a lot more
vulnerable than that. In fact, I am very vulnerable. I just try to be
myself, and that’s all I aspire to be.” Read more...

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees!

When Drone Whistleblowers are Under Attack,

What Do We Do?

STAND UP, FIGHT BACK!

We honor Stephan, Michael, Brandon and Cian!

These
four former ex-drone pilots have courageously spoken out publicly
against the U.S. drone assassination program. They have not been
charged with any crime, yet the U.S. government is retaliating against
these truth-tellers by freezing all of their bank and credit card
accounts. WE MUST BACK THEM UP!
Listen to them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43z6EMy8T28

PLEASE HELP THEM:

1. Sign up on this support network:www.facebook.com/events/1502272456740302/

**************************************************************
Statement of Support for Drone Whistleblowers
(Code Pink Women for Peace: East Bay, Golden Gate, and S.F. Chapters 11.28.15)

Code
Pink Women for Peace support the very courageous actions of four former
US drone operators, Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland,
and Stephan Lewis, who have come under increasing attack for disclosing
information about “widespread corruption and institutionalized
indifference to civilian casualties that characterize the drone
program.” As truth tellers, they stated in a public letter to President
Obama that the killing of innocent civilians has been one of the most
“devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the
world.”* These public disclosures come only after repeated attempts to
work privately within official channels failed.

Despite
the fact that none of the four has been charged with criminal activity,
all had their bank accounts and credit cards frozen. This retaliatory
response by our government is consistent with the extrajudicial nature
of US drone strikes.

We must support these former drone
operators who have taken great risks to stop the drone killing. Write
or call your US Senators, your US Representatives, President Barack
Obama, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and CIA Director John Brennan
demanding that Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland, and
Stephan Lewis be applauded, not punished, for revealing the criminal and
extrajudicial nature of drone strikes that has led to so many civilian
deaths.

For more information on the 4 Drone Whistleblowers:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1502272456740302/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43z6EMy8T28
(Must see Democracy Now interview with the 4 drone operators)

Urge
Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has
always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which
he was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting
opinion warning that the State of California "may be about to execute
an innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin
Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human
Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful
conviction, and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial
misconduct and racial discrimination which have marked the case.
Amnesty International opposes all executions, unconditionally.

"The
State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge
William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case

Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.

In
1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house
guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in
an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a
noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the
venue of his preliminary hearing.

Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

Following
his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this
politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."

Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.

In
2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime
that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the
state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin
Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.

Kevin
Cooper's case will be the subject of a new episode of CNN's "Death Row
Stories" airing on Sunday, July 26 at 7 p.m. PDT. The program will be
repeated at 10 p.m. PDT. The episode, created by executive producers
Robert Redford and Alex Gibney, will explore how Kevin Cooper was framed
by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and District
Attorney.Viewers on the east coast can see the program at 10 p.m. EDT
and it will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. EDT on July 27. Viewers in the
Central Time zone can see it at 9 p.m. and midnight CDT. Viewers in the
Mountain Time zone can see it at 8 p.m. and ll p.m MDT. It will be
aired on CNN again during the following week and will also be able to
be viewed on CNN's "Death Row Stories" website.

Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up - from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org
Kevin
Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and
sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in
Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter
Jessica and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year
old son Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

Convicted
in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin
Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin. He
has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence. In a
dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The
State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d
581.

There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:


The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the
murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a
hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could
a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four
weapons, and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were
adults (including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near
their bedsides?

 The sole surviving victim of the
murders, Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the
murders that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated
this statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr.
Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said
"that's not the man who did it."

 Josh Ryen's
description of the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were
driving near the Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported
seeing three white men in a station wagon matching the description of
the Ryens' car speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.


These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees
and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men
enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom
were covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.


The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman
who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's
department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left
blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also
reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a
tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She
also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one
recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in
the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister
saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could
have been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.

Lacking
a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution
claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a
minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But
the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the
driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The
prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and
credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder
scene.

The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days
before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had
been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to
convict.

The evidence the prosecution presented at
trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been
discredited… (Continue reading this document at:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)

This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015

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For Immediate Release – Thursday, October 29, 2015

Solitary Prisoners' Lawyers Slam CDCR for Sleep Deprivation

Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition

SAN
FRANCISCO – Yesterday, lawyers for prisoners in the class action case
Ashker v. Brown submitted a letter condemning Pelican Bay prison
guards' "wellness checks," which have widely been viewed as sleep
deprivation. The letter was submitted to United States Magistrate Judge
Nandor Vadas, and calls on the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to put an end to the checks.

Last
month, prisoners achieved a historic victory in the settlement of
Ashker v. Brown where the indefinite long term solitary confinement was
effectively ended in California, with Magistrate Judge Vadas currently
monitoring implementation of the settlement terms.

The
guards at Pelican bay Security Housing Units have been conducting
disruptive cell checks every 30 minutes around the clock for three
months, causing prisoners widespread sleep disruption. The process is
loud and according to prisoners, "the method and noise from the checks
is torture."

Attorneys representing Pelican Bay SHU
prisoners have just completed extensive interviews with prisoners who
demand that "the every 30-minute checks have to be stopped or people
are going to get sick or worse." In addition, they report that regular
prison programs have been negatively impacted.

"To
sleep is a fundamental human right," said Anne Weills, a member of the
prisoners' legal team and one of the attorneys who conducted the
interviews with prisoners in Pelican Bay. "To take away such a basic
human right amounts to severe torture, adding to the already torturous
conditions of being in solitary confinement."

Most
prisoners report low energy, exhaustion and fatigue. Most state that
they have trouble concentrating. They try to read, but they nod off
and/or can't remember what they have read. Their writing is much slower
("I can't think to write"), and describe the constant welfare checks as
having a negative impact on their mental state.

While
this recent attorney survey was specifically focusing on sleep
deprivation and its effects, prisoners volunteered information about
the negative impact of these frequent checks: yard policy and practice
has reduced access to recreation, access to showers has been reduced,
programs and meals are being delayed, and property for those newly
transferred to Pelican Bay is still being delayed and withheld.

Sleep
deprivation constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Prisoners and
their attorneys are demanding that these checks be halted.

Free Albert Woodfox!

On
June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox
unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned
three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has
appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind
bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement.
He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert
King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their
activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party.
Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is
time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice.
Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and
unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Amnesty for ALL those arresteddemanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard" — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An
estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two
weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in
the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested
include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One
individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is
now facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's
$150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.

The legal system has made it clear that they care more about
broken windows than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of
Baltimore's Black residents.

They showed no hesitation in
arresting Baltimore's protesters and rebels, and sending in the
National Guard, but took 19 days to put a single one of the killer cops
in handcuffs. This was the outrageous double standard that led to the
Baltimore Uprising.

I
stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all
charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police
brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case
of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for
this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no
indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful
protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in
the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested
include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth
who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given
an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and
justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the
windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should
work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than
criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions.
Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos

Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:

Americans
now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that
money is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing
burden for more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
Updates from the New "Team Free Lorenzo Johnson":
Thank
you all for your relentless effort in the fight against wrongful
convictions and your determination to stand behind Lorenzo.

To
garner even more support for Lorenzo Johnson, we have been hard at
work updating the website and developing an even more formidable and
dedicated team. Please take a moment to visit the new site here.

During
the month of July, Lorenzo wrote two new articles for The Huffington
Post titled "When Prosecutors Deny Justice for the Innocent," and "Hurry
Up and Wait for Justice: The Struggle of Innocent Prisoners." In these
articles, Lorenzo discusses the flaws in the criminal justice system,
which he deems is a "serious problem in this country."

Lastly, Lorenzo has a message to you all.

A Letter from Lorenzo:

July 23, 2015
Dauphin County Prison
Harrisburg, PA

Dear Supporters,

I
hope all is well with everyone and your families. As for myself, I'm
still on my journey in pursuit of my vindication. Sorry for my website
being shut down for a couple of weeks. It was being transferred to a new
provider and management. I'm back and will do my best to keep
everything up to speed with what's taking place.

I
would like to thank ALL of my loyal supporters in the U.S. and in the
MANY different counties that have signed on to support my innocence.
Thanks for all of the letters, emails, photos, etc. Like I always say, I
get energy to carry on and inspiration hearing form you, please stay
engaged in my struggle.

As of this moment, nothing has
changed, but – the continued delay tactics are constantly being used by
my prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos. With the
mounting of evidence that supports my innocence and police and
prosecution misconduct claims that is steadily piling up, you would
think that I would be having a couple of evidentiary hearings on my
actual innocence appeal that have been pending since August 5, 2013.

At
the time of this writing, I've been moved from SCI-Mahanoy to Dauphin
County Prison and locked down for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. In the
20 minutes I get to come out, I get to take a shower and make a short
call. Prosecutor Stoycos had me moved so I can be a witness in his
attempt to have my codefendant Corey Walker's attorney removed from
representing him. How dare he call into question an attorney who is
seeking justice for her client, when prosecutor Stoycos himself violated
multiple constitutional rights of mine and Mr. Walker, that led to us
being in prison for 20 years and counting.

Prosecutor
Stoycos is continuously abusing his power and his endless resources he
has at his disposal. He is not tough on crime, he's tough on Innocent
Prisoners. Prosecutor Stoycos is doing everything in his power to
prevent justice from taking place. I encourage everyone to continue to
speak out against my nightmare, invite others to get involved by going
to my website and signing my Freedom Petition and whatever else they're
willing to do.

On a positive note, I just enrolled in
warehouse management trade and started on July 13th. Unfortunately,
you're only allowed to miss a couple of days and Prosecutor Stoycos had
me temporarily transferred on July 14th … It's extremely hard on Lifers
to get into these trades due to the fact that Lifers are placed at the
back of the list of ALL vocational classes. I try to further my
education every chance I get, so when I do come home, I will be
certified in different work.

The month of the hearing
has come and left, without me being brought to the courthouse … I'm one
of MANY innocent prisoners who endures this non-stop madness in our
pursuit of Justice and Freedom. Now that my webpage is almost caught up
to speed, I promise prompt updates and as everyone knows that contacted
me directly, I personally reply to those in the states and out of the
country. For those who can make a financial contribution, everything
counts. Take care and let's continue to fight until we achieve Freedom,
Justice, and Equality for all innocent prisoners.

"The Pain Within"

Free the Innocent
Lorenzo "Cat" Johnson

[Note: Lorenzo has since been transferred back to SCI Mahanoy and can be reached at his usual address.]

Thank
you all for reading this message and please take the time to visit the
new website and contribute to Lorenzo's campaign for freedom!

Email: Through JPay using the code:
Lorenzo Johnson DF 1036 PA DOC
or
Directly at LorenzoJohnson17932@gmail.com

Have a wonderful day!
- The Team to Free Lorenzo Johnson

freelorenzojohnson.org

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Join the Fight to Free Rev. Pinkney!

Click HERE to view in browser

http://www.iacenter.org/prisoners/freepinkney-1-28-15/

UPDATE:

Today is the 406th day that Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan
languishes in prison doing felony time for a misdemeanor crime he did not
commit. Today is also the day that Robert McKay, a spokesperson for the
Free Rev. Pinkney campaign, gave testimony before United Nations
representatives about the plight of Rev. Pinkney at a hearing held in
Chicago. The hearing was called in order to shed light upon the
mistreatment of African-Americans in the United States and put it on an
international stage. And yet as the UN representatives and audience heard
of the injustices in the Pinkney case many gasped in disbelief and asked
with frowns on their faces, "how is this possible?" But disbelief quickly
disappeared when everyone realized these were the same feelings they had
when they first heard of Flint and we all know what happened in Flint. FREE
REV. PINKNEY NOW.

On
December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan
was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading
African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an
all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly
altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton
Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge's approval,
repeatedly told the jury "you don't need evidence to convict Mr.
Pinkney." And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV.
PINKNEY TO THE 'ALTERED' PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led
away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney's appeal.

Checks
can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community
Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney. Mail
them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI
49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search "Pinkney").

I
am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting
in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike
Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in
prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make
an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...)
ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I
arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred
people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people
recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the
prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2
days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on
the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this
racist."

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan
political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist
injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly
changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor
Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial
evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the
purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County
activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization
(BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the
corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor,
Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an "Occupy the
PGA [Professional Golfers' Association of America]" demonstration
against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack
Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The
course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the
city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County
officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor
Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local
corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton
Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan
cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The
Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent
charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist
white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black
city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian
ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper
column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do
this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

New Action--write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning's clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please
write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks'
whistle-blower former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea
Manning's release from military prison.

It is
important that each of these authorities realize the wide support that
Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be
reminded that millions understand that Manning is a political prisoner,
imprisoned for following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely
that any of these individuals would independently move to release
Manning, a reduction in Manning's outrageous 35-year prison sentence is
a possibility at this stage.

The
letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and
especially why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning's
sentence is reduced. The letter should NOT be anti-military as this
will be unlikely to help.

A suggested message:
"Chelsea Manning has been punished enough for violating military
regulations in the course of being true to her conscience. I urge you
to use your authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning's sentence to time
served." Beyond that general message, feel free to personalize the
details as to why you believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider
composing your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this
yourself (here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This
clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning's upcoming appeal
before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning's
new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the
prosecution's—and the trial judge's—misconduct during last year's trial
at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees at this critical stage!

New
York State will investigate high levels of radioactive contamination
found in the groundwater at the Indian Point nuclear plant, Gov. Andrew
M. Cuomo said on Saturday.

The governor said water contaminated
with tritium had leaked into the groundwater at the plant, causing
“alarming levels” of radioactivity to be found at three out of the 40
monitoring wells on the site.

One of the wells reported a 65,000
percent increase in the water’s level of radioactivity, Mr. Cuomo said,
citing a report by Entergy Corporation, which owns the plant.

Mr.
Cuomo said the contamination appeared to be limited to the groundwater
beneath the plant in Buchanan, N.Y., about 30 miles north of New York
City in Westchester County. He nevertheless expressed his alarm, adding,
“This latest failure at Indian Point is unacceptable.”“The facility
reports that the contamination has not migrated offsite and as such does
not pose an immediate threat to public health,” the governor said in a statement.
“Our first concern is for the health and safety of the residents close
to the facility and ensuring the groundwater leak does not pose a
threat.”

In a statement, Entergy said the elevated tritium levels
are “not in accordance with our standards” but that the amount of
radioactivity found at Indian Point remained more than a thousand times
below federally permissible limits.

“The tritium did not affect
any source of drinking water onsite or offsite,” the company said. It
called the presence of tritium in groundwater “a well-studied issue” and
that the state had found previous instances of contamination to have no
ill effect on public health and safety.

Nevertheless, the governor sent a letter
on Saturday to Basil Seggos, the acting commissioner of the State
Department of Environmental Conservation, and to Howard Zucker,
commissioner of the State Health Department, instructing them to “fully
investigate.”

The priority, Mr. Cuomo said, was to determine the
extent and duration of the radioactive contamination, what caused it and
whether it might affect the environment and public health of nearby
communities.

“We need to identify whether this incident could have been avoided by exercising reasonable care,” he wrote.

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2) Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

"A
study for the American Water Works Association, she noted, found that
samplings of water that had been sitting in lead pipes had unacceptable
lead levels in as much as 70.5 percent of water systems. The advisory group also urged the E.P.A. to require water systems to
eventually replace all lead pipes, but it did not address the main
obstacle to that goal: cost. At $5,000 per pipe, by one estimate, that
would consume between $16.5 billion and $50 billion — and that is but a
fraction of the $384 billion in deferred maintenance the E.P.A. says is
needed by 2030 to keep drinking water safe. ...The biggest hole in the drinking-water safety
net may be the least visible: the potential for water to be tainted by
substances that scientists and officials have not even studied, much
less regulated. ...The E.P.A. has compiled a list
of 100 potentially risky chemicals and 12 microbes that are known or
expected to be found in public water systems, but are not yet regulated.
In the last 15 years, it also has required water systems to test for 80
additional contaminants to see whether they merit regulation."

In Sebring, Ohio,
routine laboratory tests last August found unsafe levels of lead in the
town’s drinking water after workers stopped adding a chemical to keep
lead water pipes from corroding. Five months passed before the city told
pregnant women and children not to drink the water, and shut down taps
and fountains in schools.

In 2001, after Washington, D.C.,
changed how it disinfected drinking water, lead in tap water at
thousands of homes spiked as much as 20 times the federally approved
level. Residents did not find out for three years. When they did,
officials ripped out lead water pipes feeding 17,600 homes — and
discovered three years later that many of the repairs had only prolonged the contamination.The crisis in Flint, Mich.,
where as many as 8,000 children under age 6 were exposed to unsafe
levels of lead after a budget-cutting decision to switch drinking-water
sources, may be the most serious contamination threat facing the
country’s water supplies. But it is hardly the only one.

Federal
officials and many scientists agree that most of the nation’s 53,000
community water systems provide safe drinking water. But such episodes
are unsettling reminders of what experts say are holes in the safety net
of rules and procedures intended to keep water not just lead-free, but
free of all poisons.

The Environmental Protection Agency
says streams tapped by water utilities serving a third of the
population are not yet covered by clean-water laws that limit levels of
toxic pollutants. Even purified water often travels to homes through
pipes that are in stunning disrepair, potentially open to disease and
pollutants.

Although Congress banned lead water pipes 30 years
ago, between 3.3 million and 10 million older ones remain, primed to
leach lead into tap water by forces as simple as jostling during repairs
or a change in water chemistry.

“We have a lot of threats to the
water supply,” said Dr. Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor of public
health at Tufts University and a former chairman of the E.P.A.’s
Drinking Water Committee. “And we have lots of really good professionals
in the water industry who see themselves as protecting the public good.
But it doesn’t take much for our aging infrastructure or an
unprofessional actor to allow that protection to fall apart.”

Both
researchers and industry officials say problems extend well beyond
lead. Many potentially harmful contaminants have yet to be evaluated,
much less regulated. Efforts to address shortcomings often encounter
pushback from industries like agriculture and mining that fear cost
increases, and from politicians ideologically opposed to regulation.

Rules
and science are outdated. The E.P.A.’s trigger level for addressing
lead in drinking water — 15 parts per billion — is not based on any
health threat; rather, it reflects a calculation that water in at least
nine in 10 homes susceptible to lead contamination will fall below that
standard.

And while political leaders upbraid the E.P.A. and
state regulators for laggard responses to crises in Flint and elsewhere,
they have themselves lagged in offering support. Adjusted for
inflation, the $100 million annual budget of the E.P.A.’s drinking water
office has fallen 15 percent since 2006, and the office has lost more
than a tenth of its staff.

States are equally hard hit. In 2013,
the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators said federal
officials had slashed drinking-water grants, 17 states had cut
drinking-water budgets by more than a fifth, and 27 had cut spending on
full-time employees. “The cumulative effect of the resource gap has
serious implications for states’ ability to protect public health,” the
group stated.

As Flint’s water crisis surfaced last fall,
Congress was considering the E.P.A.’s effort to clarify its regulatory
powers over tributaries and wetlands — the streams that supply water to a
third of Americans.

And
Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the
Committee on Environment and Public Works, denounced the rule as a
federal power grab.

President Obama vetoed that legislation last month, but more than two dozen states have sued to block the rule. Among their arguments: It would hurt business.

An
E.P.A. spokeswoman said Friday that the agency hoped to propose
strengthened regulation of lead in drinking water in 2017, something the
agency’s administrator, Gina McCarthy, said was needed in a speech this
month in Flint. She pledged then to start “a national conversation
about this country’s water infrastructure” and resources for states.

Ms. McCarthy has also issued a new policy calling for federal regulators to take a more active role in the face of public health crises.

In
2011, the water authority in Brick Township, N.J., an oceanside
settlement of 75,000 people, tested tap water in a small sample of homes
for lead, as the E.P.A. requires be done periodically. It discovered
two homes in which the level exceeded the agency’s limit of 15 parts per
billion, well short of the number that required remedial steps.

But
in the next mandated test, three years later, it found that 16 of 34
homes exceeded the limit — one of them by a dozen times. The growing use
of road salt in recent winters, it turned out, had raised chloride levels
in the river from which Brick drew its water. Undetected, the chloride
corroded aged lead pipes running to older homes, leaching lead into tap
water.

The town has since added an anti-corrosion agent to its water, but some residents remain wary.

“Why
didn’t somebody in the water company realize with all the snow we’ve
had in those years that something was going to affect the water?” asked
Jeff Brown, 73, whose 1960s-era ranch home was built when lead was
allowed in water lines and plumbing. “I hope they’ve learned a lesson.”

The
authorities in Brick say the water now meets federal standards. But
that is cold comfort to Mr. Brown. “I’m never reassured when they tell
you what’s in federal guidelines,” he said. “Who sets the standards?”

Brick is but one example of how lead contamination can elude rules and authorities, potentially for years.

“We
need an aggressive program to get rid of lead service lines, starting
with an inventory so we know where they are,” said Lynn Thorp, the
national campaigns director for Clean Water Action, an advocacy group.
“Water systems need to up their game and take this problem more
seriously.”

Both scientists and advocates say the rules governing
contamination from lead pipes are ridden with loopholes. For example,
the E.P.A.’s lead rule requires water systems to test in only a small
number of homes with lead pipes — 50 to 100 for large systems — and
intervals between testing can stretch to three years.

Water
systems use various protocols for tap water tests, and rules allow
ordinary homeowners to conduct them unsupervised, raising questions
about their consistency. Officials must disclose contamination and take
remedial action only if tests show more than 10 percent of sampled homes
exceed the standard. Advocates say that lets utilities declare their
water safe even if contamination is uncovered.

”Over the last
decade we’ve learned that the testing routines did not detect true risk
from lead, that there are forms of lead that we’re not testing for and
that testing was too infrequent,” said Dr. Griffiths, the former
chairman of the E.P.A.’s Drinking Water Committee. “It’s hard to see how
the status quo in lead testing for water is adequately serving the
public.”

In December, the Drinking Water Committee endorsed
recommendations by an advisory group to strengthen the lead rule in
several critical areas. The group said water systems should bolster
their anti-corrosion efforts and test more often to ensure that they are
working. It called for the E.P.A. to set a standard for lead in
drinking water based on its effect on people’s health, likely below the
current level, and to require water systems to tell homeowners and
public-health officials whenever it is exceeded.

Yanna
Lambrinidou, who was on the advisory panel, is an adjunct assistant
professor of science and technology studies at Virginia Tech, whose
experts first disclosed the scope of Flint’s lead problem. She dissented
from the group’s recommendations, arguing that they did not go far
enough.

A study for the American Water Works Association, she
noted, found that samplings of water that had been sitting in lead pipes
had unacceptable lead levels in as much as 70.5 percent of water
systems.

The advisory group also urged the E.P.A. to require
water systems to eventually replace all lead pipes, but it did not
address the main obstacle to that goal: cost. At $5,000 per pipe, by one
estimate, that would consume between $16.5 billion and $50 billion —
and that is but a fraction of the $384 billion in deferred maintenance
the E.P.A. says is needed by 2030 to keep drinking water safe.

Erik
D. Olson, head of the health and environment program at the Natural
Resources Defense Council, said: “You think our roads and bridges aren’t
being fixed? The stuff underground is just totally ignored. We’re
mostly living off the investment of our parents and grandparents for our
drinking water supply.”

Some systems have gone ahead despite the
cost. In Lansing, Mich., not 60 miles from Flint, the Board of Water
and Light has replaced 13,500 lead lines since 2004, part of a $42
million project that has only 650 pipes to go. Some residents used to
fight the intrusion on their property, said Richard R. Peffley, the
utility’s general manager.

Since the Flint crisis, he said, “there’s been no resistance.”

A Hidden Problem: Unregulated Chemicals

The biggest hole in the drinking-water safety
net may be the least visible: the potential for water to be tainted by
substances that scientists and officials have not even studied, much
less regulated.

So far, it has decided to place limits on just
one, perchlorate, a salt found in rocket propellants and explosives. And
what an arduous decision it has been: The E.P.A. began tests for
perchlorate in 2001 and resolved to regulate it in 2011, but does not
expect to publish its proposed rule until March 2017.

There are
thousands of other chemicals, viruses and microbes that scientists like
Dr. Griffiths say the agency has not begun to assess. The scientists say
they can make educated guesses about the potential for harm, and most
are harmless or exist in vanishingly small amounts. But they also admit
they can be blindsided.

“We just don’t have enough research to
tell us,” said Rebecca D. Klaper, a professor of freshwater science at
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “This suite of 100 things might
be in the water, but you have to have methods and standards developed to
measure these things. Unless you have a preconceived notion of what
you’re looking for, you don’t know what’s there.”

Toledo, Ohio,
shut down its drinking water for three days in 2014 after microcystin,
an unregulated toxin produced by algae-like bacteria clogging Lake Erie,
tainted its supplies. Microcystin and related toxins, which can cause
liver damage and have killed animals, have since been added to the list
of potentially dangerous contaminants.

Another example: Many
water systems draw from rivers loaded with nitrates, the product of
fertilizer runoff and sewage overflow. But researchers were long unaware
that removing nitrates from finished water can leave behind a toxic
byproduct, nitrosamines, the cancer-causing chemical found in cooked bacon.

The
soup of contaminants in many water sources holds other possibilities
for trouble. The E.P.A.’s latest list of potentially risky substances
includes some variants of estrogen, compounds from birth-control pills and other pharmaceuticals
that are already linked to sexual changes in fish. Individually, they
probably pose little risk to humans. Together, Dr. Klaper said, the risk
may or may not be greater.

“How do you look at the long-term
impact of these trace chemicals?” she asked. “That’s what we’re trying
to wrap our heads around. The research that could determine whether
anything is a problem is very complicated.”

Ultimately, water
problems in Flint and elsewhere suggest a failing in society’s concept
of water, said Henry L. Henderson, the Midwest program director for the
Natural Resources Defense Council.

“We see safe and sufficient
water as a human right,” he said. “It needs to be approached as a public
service matter, not a private commercial commodity.”

Cost
considerations drove the decision to switch Flint from Lake Huron water
to Flint River water, unleashing the lead problems. But water, Mr.
Henderson said, has to be more than a matter of the bottom line.

The
rookie New York City police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man
in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project testified on Monday that
he drew his weapon because of the foreboding and dangerous environment
and that he mistakenly fired his gun when he became startled.

As
he described the events of that night, the officer, Peter Liang, broke
down and had to take a break from testifying to compose himself.

The
emotions on display in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn reflected the
intensity of the feelings surrounding the trial, which has raised
questions about the lethal use of force by the police and the difficult
situations law enforcement officers can find themselves in even when
performing what would be considered routine duty.

On Nov. 20,
2014, Officer Liang and his partner, Shaun Landau, were conducting what
is known as a vertical patrol at the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New
York.Officer Liang had just entered a darkened stairwell when he fired
his gun, the bullet ricocheting off a wall before striking Akai Gurley,
28, who was walking down the stairs with his girlfriend.

Officer Liang, 28, is charged with manslaughter and other offenses.

Prosecutors
have spent much of the two-week trial arguing that unholstering his
weapon was unwarranted and reckless in a place filled with residents
going about their daily business.

Officer Liang said that before
entering the stairwell, he had seen bullet holes on the roof. “I feel
the need to take my gun out,” he said.

Struggling to keep his
composure, he described the moment he fired his weapon — the result of a
combination of dread and confusion.

“I heard something on my
left side; it was a quick sound and it just startled me, and the gun
just went off after I tensed up,” he said.

Officer Liang was
relatively new to the force. The dangers of the kind of patrol he was on
were underscored last week when two officers, Diara E. Cruz and Patrick
Espeut, were shot in a housing project in the Bronx.

As a lawyer for the defense asked Officer Liang to recall the shooting, he became overwhelmed with emotion.

“I
said, ‘Oh my god, someone is hit!’” he said, as his mother watched in
the packed courtroom. “I went over the radio, ‘Pink Post One, male shot,
call a bus.’”

He became unable to continue and was offered a brief break to compose himself before being questioned by prosecutors.

In
addition to the manslaughter charge, Officer Liang is charged with
official misconduct for not helping Mr. Gurley as he lay on a
fifth-floor landing. Transcripts from radio calls that night that have
been introduced into evidence do not show that Officer Liang called for
an ambulance.

Thirty years to the day after Haiti’s
last dictator fled the impoverished nation as it took its first wobbly
steps toward democracy, another leader stepped down Sunday, without a
successor to take his place.

Mr.
Martelly departed at the end of his five-year term, thanks to a
last-minute agreement that laid out steps to choose a provisional
government to take his place. Although the agreement left major doubts
about who will govern the nation in the months to come, experts hailed
it as an important move toward at least temporarily resolving a
political impasse that had put hundreds of protesters on the streets.

At
least one person was beaten to death Friday, as former army soldiers
supporting Mr. Martelly hit the streets to counter protests that
demanded his ouster.“I said I would not hand over power to those that
don’t believe in elections, but the Parliament guaranteed that they will
do everything to make sure the process carries on,” Mr. Martelly said
in his last speech to Parliament, before handing the presidential sash
to the leader of the National Assembly. “I am leaving office to
contribute to constitutional normalcy.”

Mr. Martelly, a former
pop music star, was criticized for failing to hold elections during his
five years in office and for surrounding himself with cronies, some of
them criminals. He never shed his garish style and was considered an
autocrat who let Parliament expire during his tenure.

But Mr. Martelly said he had “faced the impossible” when he “inherited pain and misery” five years ago, a year after a huge earthquake killed hundreds of thousands of people and toppled sections of the capital.

Haiti’s
latest political crisis resulted from a presidential election held in
October with 54 candidates and that critics said was riddled with fraud.
Political operatives were able to vote multiple times, and the
president’s handpicked successor came in first despite being a virtual
unknown, leaving the 52 candidates who did not make the runoff vote to
question the results.

The runoff was delayed twice as protesters demanded clarity.

Mr.
Martelly insisted that there had been no fraud and that the runoff
should take place, urging voters to choose his candidate, Jovenel Moïse,
a banana exporter. But a former government official who officially came
in second, Jude Célestin, refused to participate in the runoff until a
new electoral council was chosen and a thorough review of the first
round was conducted.

Under the accord reached this weekend, the
prime minister will stay until an interim president is chosen by both
chambers of Parliament. Once the interim president is in place, a
consensus prime minister will be chosen, and a verification commission
will review the October balloting.

“The headline should read: ‘A
blood bath was avoided,’ ” said an official at the Organization of
American States, which sent a special delegation to Haiti to help
resolve the crisis. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of
the diplomatic delicacy of the matter.

The official said 28
meetings had been held to reach an agreement, many into the early hours
of the morning. Mr. Martelly agreed to allow a member of an opposition
party to be selected as interim president, an important concession.

The
agreement stipulates that an election will be held by April 24, and a
new president installed May 14. John Kirby, a State Department
spokesman, said the agreement was a step toward ensuring “the continuity
of governance and the completion of the ongoing electoral process.”

Robert
Fatton Jr., a political scientist at the University of Virginia who
follows Haiti closely, said, “It’s all nice and jolly, but there are
real problems.”

He said disputes could arise if the commission
verifying the last election determined that different candidates should
proceed to the runoff, or if the election results should be scrapped
altogether.

“The old military people that are out on the streets
are sending a clear signal to opposition groups: ‘If you don’t accept
this compromise, we are out here, with weapons,’ ” Mr. Fatton said. “No
one knows who was in charge of these people. Everyone assumes they are
in fact armed people and armed by the Michel Martelly regime, otherwise they would not be so free to go to the streets.”

Michigan
health officials on Tuesday defended their handling of a deadly
Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Flint after widespread criticism of
their failure to promptly notify the public, and questions about state
regulators’ cooperation with their local counterparts.

The
Michigan Department of Health and Human Services also released emails
related to its handling of the outbreak, in a seeming attempt to prove
it sought a thorough investigation but was thwarted at times by local
health officials in Genesee County, which includes Flint.

The
health department acted as state investigators on Tuesday said that the
scope of their inquiry into the contamination of Flint’s water was
broad, and that charges could range from involuntary manslaughter to
official misconduct. And Flint’s mayor said residents had so little
faith in the government’s response to the problem that the only way they
could be reassured would be if all the lead service lines in the city
were replaced.Gov. Rick Snyder was expected on Wednesday to propose $195
million in additional aid for Flint, according to a state official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity because the request had not been
made public. A spokesman for Mr. Snyder declined to comment.

Federal,
state and local officials have been under scrutiny for how they reacted
to complaints about the quality of water in Flint after it was switched
to a new source, the Flint River, in 2014. A trail of emails released
so far shows that various levels of government let months go by without
alerting residents to the danger coming out of their taps. The water has
been linked to elevated levels of lead in children’s blood in Flint,
raising fears that many will suffer from developmental and physical
disabilities for years to come.

The state has also been
criticized for its delayed action after an outbreak in Genesee County of
87 cases of Legionnaires’ disease since June 2014, and nine associated
deaths. Many suspect the change in water source caused the outbreak, but
officials say they cannot prove that.

In a statement, the
Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday that it had
communicated regularly about Legionnaires’ disease with its counterparts
at the county health department in Flint.

“We know that the
Legionnaires’ outbreaks have added to public concerns,” said Dr. Eden
Wells, Michigan’s chief medical executive, in the statement. “We want
Flint to know we take these concerns seriously — that we have
investigated these cases and committed our staff to support and guide
the local investigations.”

An article in The Detroit Free Press
on Tuesday quoted emails from county and federal officials frustrated
with the state’s response and the poor coordination among levels of
government. The Michigan health department statement said “recent
comments in the media are inconsistent with the collaboration that has
taken place” between state and county regulators.

But the more
than 50 pages of emails released by the state, showing the interaction
between state and local officials from October 2014, suggest that the
Legionnaires’ investigation did not seem to get underway — or at least
the agency appeared not to be involved — until that month. There had
already been at least 30 cases in the county since June.

They
also depict a scramble to step up the investigation of the 2014 outbreak
early in 2015, including a drawn-out effort to figure out what to ask
people who had been found to have Legionnaires’ disease months earlier.
According to the state, many of the victims “had never been contacted
for an interview by the Genesee County Health Department” at that point.

Further,
they show that when the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention informed state health officials last February that Genesee
County had requested its help investigating the outbreak, the internal
response was one of irritation.

“This is getting real old real
fast,” Shannon Johnson, a state epidemiologist, wrote in an email to
colleagues after learning that the county had reached out to the C.D.C.

A spokeswoman for the Genesee County Health Department did not immediately respond to email and phone messages about the emails.

There
has been no confirmation that the cause of the Legionnaires’ outbreak
in Genesee County was the drinking water. Dr. Wells said last week that
there had been no new cases since October, when the city switched back
to getting its water from Lake Huron.

Michigan’s attorney general
said Tuesday that a team of several investigators had already begun
looking at evidence related to Flint’s water troubles.

“We’re
here to investigate what possible crimes there are, from anything to the
involuntary manslaughter or death that may have happened to some young
person or older person because of this poisoning, to misconduct in
office,” said Todd Flood, special counsel for the state’s Flint
investigation. “We take this very seriously.”

Also on Tuesday,
Mayor Karen Weaver said the city would start replacing the lead service
lines connecting individual homes to the city water system. She called
on the state and federal governments to help with the estimated $55
million needed to replace 15,000 lines in the next year.

“We
deserve new pipes,” said Ms. Weaver, who was elected last year on a
promise to fix the city’s water problems. “That’s the only way this
community is going to be confident, and people will stay here and people
will come. We have to get new pipes.”

MEXICO
CITY — A fight between two inmates at a penitentiary in the northern
Mexican city of Monterrey escalated into a riot early Thursday that left
52 prisoners dead, the state governor said.

The trouble began
just before midnight at the Topo Chico Prison when the two men,
identified only as Jorge Ivan “N” and Juan Pedro “N,” began fighting,
said Gov. Jaime Rodríguez Calderón of Nuevo León.

As the violence spread, prisoners set fire to the prison warehouse.

It remained unclear precisely how the inmates had died.

Twelve inmates were reported injured in the uproar at the prison, the oldest in Nuevo León.

Initial
news reports said that the riot had broken out as part of an escape
attempt, but the government said on its Twitter feed that none of the
inmates had escaped.

“We are living through tragedy due to the
conditions in the prisons,” Governor Rodríguez said at a news conference
in Monterrey.Forces from the federal police, the navy marines and the
army surrounded the prison, the governor said, as relatives of the
inmates gathered outside awaiting news.

Mexican
prisons are vastly overcrowded and riots frequently break out. In
September, a leader of the Zetas drug gang was stabbed to death at Topo
Chico in a riot that left 11 inmates wounded.

In February of 2012, 44 prisoners were bludgeoned and stabbed to death
as guards stood by in a state prison in Apodaca, in the Monterrey
suburbs, in a riot initiated by the Zetas. As the Zetas killed inmates
from their rivals in the Gulf cartel, 30 Zeta leaders escaped.

The
month before 31 inmates died in a prison in the neighboring state of
Tamaulipas in fighting between Zetas and the Gulf cartel.

BRUSSELS — The defense ministers from all 28 NATO
countries approved a plan on Wednesday to enhance the alliance’s
military presence in Central and Eastern Europe, part of its expanding
efforts to deter Russian aggression, according to NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.

The
forces will rotate through the countries to conduct exercises, and NATO
will also enlarge its infrastructure in the region so it can quickly
respond to threats, Mr. Stoltenberg said. In the spring, the alliance’s
military planners will recommend how large the presence should be, he
said.

“This will be multinational, to make clear that an attack
against one ally is an attack against all allies, and that the alliance
as a whole will respond,” Mr. Stoltenberg said at a news conference at
NATO headquarters here shortly after the agreement was reached.A week
earlier, the Obama administration announced that it would more than quadruple its spending
to expand its footprint in Eastern Europe. As part of its budget
proposal for the 2017 fiscal year, the administration asked for $3.4
billion — compared with $789 million in the current budget — for “more
pre-positioned war-fighting gear” in the countries, and more training
and exercises.

Among the countries that NATO and the United States are looking to protect are Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and the Baltic States, according to administration officials.

The
size of the American contribution surprised some analysts, who saw it
as one of the most aggressive moves the United States has made in the
region since the fall of the Soviet Union. Administration officials have
said they hope that their commitment to protecting these countries
sends a message to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that his aggression in the region will no longer be tolerated.

In recent months, Russia
has scaled back its military efforts in eastern Ukraine, but troops
remain there, and many other countries in the region fear what Mr. Putin
may do next. At the same time, Mr. Putin has thrust the Russian
military into the Syrian conflict, as his forces on the ground and in
the air fight alongside forces backing President Bashar al-Assad of
Syria.

While NATO officials move ahead with toughening their
posture toward Russia, they are also discussing how to expand their role
in the American-led coalition to defeat the Islamic State, according to
a senior Pentagon official. NATO officials are considering how they can
send trainers to Iraq to help rebuild the crumbling military, the
official said. It is not clear how close the officials are to approving
the plan.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter will
convene a meeting with the defense ministers from two dozen countries to
discuss how they can contribute more to the campaign to defeat the
Islamic State.

At the news conference on Wednesday, Mr.
Stoltenberg said NATO “faces the most challenging security environment
in a generation,” with threats from cyberattacks as well as from states
and nonaligned forces.

He acknowledged the recent request from Turkey,
a NATO member, for additional help to stem the flow of migrants from
Syria, Iraq and Africa. But he declined to say what Turkey had
specifically asked for.

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European
Union’s commissioner for migration, bemoaned the lack of a navy under
the command of the union to save migrants’ lives by patrolling the sea
near Turkey and Greece.

But Mr. Avramopoulos, a former defense
minister of Greece and mayor of Athens, said at a separate news
conference in Brussels that it was too early to comment on whether NATO
forces should be used in such a role, and he appeared lukewarm to the
idea.

“For the moment, this issue is not officially open for
discussion,” he said, referring to news reports that Germany and Turkey
had requested NATO’s assistance.

Pushed to say whether the
alliance could eventually play a role in rescuing migrants, Mr.
Avramopoulos responded that there was no “element of threat” ordinarily
required to prompt a NATO response. Mr. Avramopoulos also emphasized
that Italy and Greece already “had very capable defense systems” and
could deploy them if needed.

The crisis has threatened to tear
the bloc apart as member countries re-establish border controls and
struggle to mount a unified response. More than one million migrants and
refugees arrived in the European Union last year, and even more could
arrive this year.

"Court
documents published online revealed that the city of Cleveland filed
suit against the boy’s estate on Feb 10. The final moments of his life
are itemized in an emergency medical services bill: $10 for each of the
five miles it took to get him to the hospital, where he later died; $450
for advanced life support in the ambulance that took him there.

Nearly
15 months after a Cleveland police officer fatally shot Tamir Rice, 12,
while the boy was playing with a pellet gun near a recreation area, the
city has sued to collect $500 for his “last dying expense” — the cost
of his emergency medical treatment.

Court documents published
online revealed that the city of Cleveland filed suit against the boy’s
estate on Feb 10. The final moments of his life are itemized in an
emergency medical services bill: $10 for each of the five miles it took
to get him to the hospital, where he later died; $450 for advanced life
support in the ambulance that took him there.

The lawsuit wants Tamir’s family to pay the bill by March 11.

The documents were posted online by Cleveland Scene
and other local news outlets on Wednesday. A lawyer for the Rice
family, Subodh Chandra, denounced the suit and told the Cleveland Scene
that the move by the city was “nothing short of breathtaking,” adding,
“The mayor and law director should apologize to the Rice family and
withdraw this filing immediately.

“That the city would submit a
bill and call itself a creditor after having had its own police officers
slay 12-year-old Tamir displays a new pinnacle of callousness and
insensitivity.”

Mr. Chandra could not immediately be reached for
comment on Thursday. A call to the city’s law department was referred to
the mayor’s office, where a spokesman was not immediately available.

No
one has been charged in the shooting, but the case became one of a
series of killings that drew large protests over police treatment of
African-Americans.

Tamir’s case began about 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 2014,
when he was playing with the pellet gun outside the Cudell Recreation
Area in Cleveland. Someone called 911 to report that a male was pointing
a gun at people, but added that the gun was “probably fake,” and that
the person waving it was “probably a juvenile.”

Those caveats, however, were not relayed to officers who responded, it was later revealed.

Officer
Timothy Loehmann and his partner, Frank Garmback, who was driving the
patrol car, pulled up to the park. Officer Loehmann fired two shots
within seconds of arriving at the park, fatally striking the boy in the
abdomen.

In December 2015, a grand jury declined to charge Officer Loehmann. Timothy J. McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, said video from the scene
had made it “indisputable” that Tamir was drawing the pellet gun from
his waistband when he was shot, either to hand it over to the officers
or to show them that it was not a real firearm.

Mr. McGinty said
that there was no reason for the officers to know that, and that Officer
Loehmann had a reason to fear for his life. Officer Garmback was also
spared any charges.

LAREDO,
Tex. — They are crossing the border here by the hundreds each day,
approved to enter the United States in a matter of hours.

Part of
a fast-rising influx of Cubans, they walk out to a Laredo street and
are greeted by volunteers from Cubanos en Libertad, or Cubans in
Freedom, who help them arrange travel to their American destination —
often Miami — and start applying for work permits and federal benefits
like food stamps and Medicaid, available by law to Cubans immediately after their arrival.

The
friendly reception given the Cubans, an artifact of hostile relations
with the Castro government, is a stark contrast with the treatment of
Central American families fleeing violence in their countries. And it is
creating tensions in this predominantly Mexican-American city, where
residents saw how Central American migrants, who came in an influx in
2014, were detained by the Border Patrol
and ordered to appear in immigration courts.“The people here are
starting to feel resentment,” said Representative Henry Cuellar,
Democrat of Texas, whose congressional district includes the city. “They
are asking, is it fair that the Cubans get to stay and the Central
Americans are being deported?”

The disparity will be in sharp
relief next week when Pope Francis comes to the border at El Paso to
offer prayers for the many migrants who have faced danger or arrest
trying to cross the United States border.

Town officials have
warned Cubans not to loiter in the streets. Local bus companies complain
that Cubans are chartering special vans to travel. Some residents here
have also begun to speak up.

A group of veterans from Afghanistan
and Iraq held two protests by the border bridge in recent weeks, saying
the federal government was spending money on Cubans when it was not
meeting the needs of people here.

“We make everyone from Central
America wait in line, while the Cubans walk in even though they are not
refugees,” said Gabriel Lopez, a Mexican-American Navy veteran who is
president of the group of veterans. “We are saying, don’t open the
borders to Cubans and give them instant benefits while we have American
veterans living on the streets.”

In coming weeks the number of
Cubans is expected to spike, as more than 5,000 who have been stalled in
Costa Rica since late last year will leave there on regular plane
flights agreed to by governments in Central America and Mexico. Already
about 12,100 Cubans entered through Laredo and other Texas border
stations in the last three months of 2015, according to official
figures. Border officials say as many as 48,000 Cubans could cross here
this year, more than all those who came in the last two years combined.

Under
the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law Congress passed in 1966 in the early
years of enmity with Fidel Castro, any Cuban who sets foot on American
soil is given permission to enter, known as parole. Cubans are also
eligible for federal welfare benefits including financial assistance for
nine months under separate polices from the 1980s. After a year, they
can apply for permanent residency, a gateway to citizenship.

The
recent exodus from Cuba began in mid-2014, even before President Obama
in December of that year announced a restoration of diplomatic relations
with the government, now led by Mr. Castro’s brother Raúl. In a major
change, President Raúl Castro allowed Cubans to leave the country
without exit visas. Many Cubans have said that rumors that the special
entry to the United States would be canceled had caused them to pack up
and go.

“The rumors are unfounded,” Alan Bersin, assistant
secretary of Homeland Security, said in an interview, seeking to dispel
the fears. “The Cuban Adjustment Act is still in effect and is part of
the overall immigration policy and there is no intent presently to
change that.”

Mr. Cuellar has called for the act to be repealed,
but he acknowledges there is little prospect that Congress will act this
year.

The recent influx is nothing like the chaotic rush of
Cubans fleeing the Communist government that overwhelmed South Florida
with the Mariel boatlift in 1980, and the rafter crisis
in 1994. The federal border authorities, who have been watching the
number of Cubans growing steadily, added officers and opened extra rooms
in the border station, doubling their capacity to process them. Most
Cubans move through in less than an hour, officials said.

Frank Longoria, assistant director of field operations for United States Customs and Border Protection,
said that despite their numbers, the Cubans’ entry has not affected the
huge flows of people and freight trucks each day through Laredo, the
country’s largest land port of entry.

At the border, Cubans are
fingerprinted and pass through routine criminal and terrorism background
checks. There is no special vetting for Cubans, and there are no
medical examinations or vaccination requirements.

“Right now I
feel like the freest Cuban in the whole world,” said Rodny Nápoles, 39, a
coach of the Cuban national women’s water polo team who crossed into
Laredo this week.

This week, the first direct flights from
northern Costa Rica to the Mexican city just across the border brought
more than 300 Cubans, including at least 41 pregnant women and their
families.

One of them, Yadelys Rodríguez Martín, 28, who was 19
weeks pregnant, sat down to rest and enjoy a moment of relief on the
front steps of Cubanos en Libertad, right after emerging from the border
station. After traveling through Ecuador and being stuck for three
months in Costa Rica because of a political dispute in the region, she
said she was stunned by how quickly she had been admitted into the
United States.

“We are not used to things happening so fast,” Ms. Rodríguez said.

No
threat of persecution or attack had driven her to leave, Ms. Rodríguez
said. Like many Cubans arriving here, she left, she said, to escape a
moribund economy. As a civil engineer, she was earning the equivalent of
$25 a month.

Others said they could no longer stand the Castro
government’s stifling control. “I am looking for freedom of expression,”
said Janet Sague González, 27, who was seven months pregnant and
clutching her new parole document. “I want my child to be born in a free
country.”

Alejandro Ruiz, a Cuban-American who left New Jersey
in 2014 to found Cubanos en Libertad here, said the federal stipend and
food stamps that Cubans receive during their first months had proved
invaluable in giving them time to get oriented and learn English while
they found jobs.

But Laredo residents recall the days in 2014
when women and children from Central America, who said they were fleeing
from murderous criminal gangs, were packed in frigid detention cells
here and crowded the bus station after they were released carrying only
orders for a date before a judge. With no blanket admission, they faced
uphill battles in court to win asylum that often ended in deportation.

“People
are not saying, don’t let the Cubans in,” said Ricardo de Anda, a
lawyer and rancher in Laredo who helped mobilize aid for the Central
Americans. “They are pointing out the irony of an immigration system
that allows them to come in at will and causes so much hardship to
others.”

But at the border station, one Cuban, Milton Borges
González, 38, knew only that he was “the happiest man on earth” when his
pregnant wife, Lisbeth Torres, emerged with her parole in hand. He had
come before her and was living in Houston.

“I came to work,” Mr.
Borges said, “and here they let you work and they pay you if you work.
The United States gives us a lot of help because we are Cubans,” he
said. “Thank God for that.”

A
New York City police officer was convicted of manslaughter on Thursday
for killing an unarmed man who was hit by a ricocheting bullet fired
from the officer’s gun in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project in
a case that highlighted concerns over police accountability.

The
officer, Peter Liang, and his partner were conducting a so-called
vertical patrol on Nov. 20, 2014, inside the Louis H. Pink Houses in the
East New York neighborhood. At one point, Officer Liang opened a door
into an unlighted stairwell and his gun went off. The bullet glanced off
a wall and hit Akai Gurley, 28, who was walking down the stairs with
his girlfriend, and pierced his heart.Mr. Liang, a rookie officer who
had graduated from the Police Academy the year before the shooting, was
also found guilty of official misconduct for failing to help Mr. Gurley
as he lay on a fifth-floor landing. Mr. Gurley’s girlfriend, Melissa
Butler, had testified
that while she knelt in a pool of his blood trying to resuscitate him,
the officer stopped briefly but did not help before proceeding down the
stairs.

The verdict, delivered in State Supreme Court in
Brooklyn, comes amid a national debate on the policing of black
neighborhoods after a string of killings of unarmed black men by police
officers. And the jury’s decision is a rare instance in which a police
officer was convicted of killing someone in the line of duty.

The
jury deliberated a little more than two days before reaching a verdict.
The Police Department said soon after the verdict that it had fired
Officer Liang.

After hearing the verdict, Officer Liang bowed his
head and sank his face into his hands. His lawyer placed a hand on the
officer’s back. The officer left the courthouse without speaking to
reporters.

“Clearly it’s a terrible tragedy Mr. Gurley died,”
said one of Officer Liang’s lawyers, Robert E. Brown, who had described
the shooting as a freakish accident. “My client feels terrible about it,
but what he did wasn’t a crime.”

The jury’s decision elicited
tears from Mr. Gurley’s family and friends. They huddled in a group
embrace, crying, swaying and offering words of relief and thanks.

Mr.
Liang, 28, faces up to 15 years in prison on the second-degree
manslaughter charge when he is sentenced on April 14. Most of the jurors
left the courtroom quickly, but one juror, who declined to give his
name, said in a brief interview that the decision had been “very, very,
very difficult.”

“I’ve got to face my family; half of them are cops,” he added.

The
prosecutors portrayed Officer Liang as acting recklessly in pulling out
his weapon and firing inside a public space where residents come and
go. They also accused him of being more concerned over what the shooting
would mean for his career than in abiding by police rules and trying to
help Mr. Gurley, a father to two young girls, after he had been shot.

Mr.
Liang’s lawyers had argued that he was in a state of shock over what he
had done; they said he felt unqualified to perform CPR, as is required
of an officer under such circumstances, because he received poor
training at the Police Academy. His partner, Officer Shaun Landau, who
was provided immunity from prosecution, also testified
about receiving little training. He said Officer Liang sank to the
floor, in tears, shortly after realizing he had shot someone. The
prosecution introduced a radio call Mr. Liang made into evidence, saying
he did not call for an ambulance. The defense said the dispatch was
tantamount to a call for help for Mr. Gurley.ry

In
a statement on Thursday night, Mayor Bill de Blasio said: “The death of
Akai Gurley was a tragedy. The jury has now spoken, and we respect its
decision. We hope today’s outcome brings some closure to the Gurley
family after this painful event.”

Patrick J. Lynch, the president
of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police
union, denounced the verdict, saying it would have “a chilling effect on
police officers across the city because it criminalizes a tragic
accident.”

And Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants
Benevolent Association, said that Police Commissioner William J.
Bratton, “who so often brags of the evolution of policing, now needs to
suspend the efforts of vertical patrol and re-evaluate his policy.”

The
Brooklyn district attorney, Ken Thompson, told reporters that as the
verdict was read he turned to Sylvia Palmer, Mr. Gurley’s mother, and
whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“I told his mother, ‘I’m sorry,’” he said. “I’m sorry we were in that courtroom at that point.”

Mr. Thompson made it clear that the conviction “was is in no way a conviction of the New York City Police Department.”

“What
we are saying, and what we said in this case, is that we have to have
police officers who follow the training they’re given,” he added.

The
shooting came at a tense moment in relations between the police and the
city’s black population — four months earlier, a Staten Island man,
Eric Garner, died after he was placed in a chokehold by a police officer who had been trying to help arrest Mr. Garner for selling loose cigarettes.

More
broadly, Mr. Gurley’s death became linked by many to the string of
killings across the country of unarmed black men at the hands of the
police.

In New York, officers are rarely indicted by grand
juries, let alone put on trial, for deaths that occur in the line of
duty — no officer has been charged in the death of Mr. Garner in 2014.

In
2005, an undercover police officer was convicted by a State Supreme
Court judge for killing an unarmed African immigrant, Ousmane Zongo, 43,
during a raid inside a Chelsea warehouse. And in a case that set off
protests and widespread condemnation, three detectives were found not
guilty of all charges in 2008 after a nonjury trial in the death of Sean Bell, 23, who was killed on his wedding day in Queens by police gunfire.

In opening statements,
a lawyer for the defense, Rae Downes Koshetz, strove to make clear that
the trial was “not a referendum on policing in the United States.” The
defense also argued that patrolling housing projects is one of the most
dangerous assignments for a police officer, a point that seemed to be
driven home during the trial when two officers conducting such a patrol
inside a Bronx housing project were shot and wounded.

The key moment of the trial was perhaps the emotional testimony
of Mr. Liang himself, who said he was startled when he heard a sound in
the stairwell, causing him to flinch before his weapon fired. He said
he did not realize anyone had been hit until he went down the stairs to
look for the bullet. As he described finding Mr. Gurley lying wounded,
Mr. Liang turned his back to the courtroom and started to cry.

Mr.
Gurley’s relatives, many of whom sat in the front row of the courtroom
every day of the more than two-week trial, have viewed Mr. Gurley’s
death as inextricably linked to the issues of how black communities are
the victims of excessive and unjust policing. Officer Liang, who is
Chinese-American, has strong support in the Chinese community, and his
mother and several members of his family have attended much of the
trial.

His mother declined to comment after the verdict.

Outside
the courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, one of Mr. Gurley’s aunts,
Hertencia Petersen, stood next to his mother, while behind them, his
stepfather swayed back and forth, at times raising his palms skyward as
if in praise. Ms. Petersen said she was moved that the jury had
convicted a police officer, adding that the guilty verdict was an
outcome “that has not come down in how long?”

Noah Remnick contributed reporting.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

11) Emmett Till and Tamir Rice, Sons of the Great Migration
"...according to one analysis of F.B.I. statistics, an African-American is killed by a white police officer roughly every three and a half days..."

Atlanta
— IN winter 1916, several hundred black families from the Selma, Ala.,
Cotton Belt began quietly defecting from the Jim Crow South, with its
night rides and hanging trees, some confiding to The Chicago Defender in
February that the “treatment doesn’t warrant staying.” It was the start
of the Great Migration, a leaderless revolution that would incite six
million black refugees over six decades to seek asylum within the
borders of their own country.

They could not know what
was in store for them or their descendants, nor the hostilities they
would face wherever they went. Consider the story of two mothers whose
lives bookend the migration and whose family lines would meet similar,
unimaginable fates. The horrors they were fleeing would follow them in
freedom and into the current day.

The first was Mamie
Carthan Till, whose parents carried her from Mississippi to Illinois
early in the 1920s. In Chicago, she would marry and give birth to a son,
Emmett. In the summer of 1955, she would send him to visit relatives
back in Mississippi. Emmett had just turned 14, had been raised in the
new world and was unschooled in the “yes, sir, no, sir” ways of the
Southern caste system. That August, he was kidnapped, beaten and shot to
death, ostensibly for whistling at a white woman at a convenience
store. His murder would become a turning point in the civil rights
movement.

Around that year, another woman, Millie Lee
Wylie, left the bottomlands of Sumter County, Ala., near where the
migration had begun, and settled in Cleveland. There, more than half a
century later, just before Thanksgiving 2014, her 12-year-old
great-grandson, bundled up in the cold, was playing with a friend’s
pellet gun at a park outside a recreation center. His name was Tamir
Rice. A now familiar video shows a police officer shooting him seconds
after arrival, and an officer tackling his sister to the ground as she
ran toward her dying brother. Tamir’s became one of the most
recognizable names in a metronome of unarmed black people killed by the
police in the last two years, further galvanizing the Black Lives Matter
movement.

Tamir Rice would become to this young
century what Emmett Till was to the last. In pictures, the boys resemble
each other, the same half-smiles on their full moon faces, the most
widely distributed photographs of them taken from the same angle, in
similar light, their clear eyes looking into the camera with the same
male-child assuredness of near adolescence. They are now tragic symbols
of the search for black freedom in this country.

It has
been a century since the Great Migration that produced both boys began.
Our current era seems oddly aligned with that moment. The brutal
decades preceding the Great Migration — when a black person was lynched
on average every four days — were given a name by the historian Rayford
Logan. He called them the Nadir. Today, in the era of the Charleston
massacre, when, according to one analysis
of F.B.I. statistics, an African-American is killed by a white police
officer roughly every three and a half days, has the makings of a second
Nadir.

Or perhaps, in the words of Eric Foner, the
leading scholar of Reconstruction, a “second Redemption.” That is what
historians call the period of backlash against the gains made by newly
freedmen that led to Jim Crow.

Today, with black
advancement by an elite few extending as far as the White House, we are
seeing “a similar kind of retreat,” Professor Foner said. “The attack on
voting rights, incarceration, obviously but even more intellectually
and culturally, a sort of exhaustion with black protest, an attitude of
‘What are these people really complaining about? Look at what we’ve done
for you.’ ”

The country seems caught in a cycle. We
leap forward only to slip back. “We have not made anywhere near the
progress we think we have,” said Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice
Initiative in Alabama. “It’s as if we’re at halftime, and we started
cheering as if we won the game.”

What befell Emmett and
Tamir reflects how racial interactions have mutated over time, from the
overt hatreds now shunned by most Americans to the unspoken,
unconscious biases that are no less lethal and may be harder to fight.
For all of its changes, the country remains in a similar place, a caste
system based on what people look like.

The men and
women of the Great Migration were asking questions that remain
unanswered today: What is to be the role of the people whom the country
has marginalized by law and custom and with state-sanctioned violence
for most of their time on this soil? How might these now 45 million
people, still the most segregated of all groups in America, partake of
the full fruits of citizenship? How can deeply embedded racial
hierarchies be overcome?

TAMIR RICE’S
great-grandmother, Millie Lee Wylie, was born into a family of farm
hands and sawmill workers. She married young and was left a widow when
her husband died after a fall in a crooked river. With dreams of a new
life, she packed up her belongings and left the tenant shacks of Alabama
for the smokestacks of Cleveland, later sending for her three young
sons. Like many of the women new to the north, she found work as a
housekeeper and later as a hospital janitor. She would have two more
children and marry a man named Robert Petty, who worked at the old
Republic Steel plant and whose family had arrived years before from
Mississippi by way of Kentucky.

They found themselves
hemmed into the worn-out, predominantly black east side of Cleveland,
with other refugees from the South. He worked the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
shift; she worked from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. He played the numbers and bet
the horses at Thistledown to help make the rent on their apartment, in a
dilapidated four-flat owned by an Eastern European woman who saw no
need to keep it up.

They finally saved up for a
two-story house with aluminum siding in the suburbs. The white neighbors
began moving out shortly thereafter, a common response to black efforts
to move up in most every receiving station in the North.

Millie
— now Mrs. Petty — went about recreating the things she missed from the
“old country.” She planted collard greens and watermelons and raised
chickens in the backyard. She cooked neck bone and made hogshead cheese,
singing hymns — “I’m coming up on the rough side of the mountain” — as
she worked. Sundays, she ushered at a storefront Baptist church in her
belted navy dress with white gloves and collar, perfumed with her one
indulgence, Chanel No. 5.

After lives of work and want,
both she and her husband died in their 50s, she of cancer and he of a
heart attack after losing a lung from asbestos exposure at the plant.
Their early deaths left the family ungrounded, without the close
networks that had sustained their Southern ancestors. The daughter,
Darlette Pinkston, suffered for it. Her marriage did not last, and she
began living with a man who beat and threatened her until, fearing for
her life, she killed him. Her daughter, Samaria, was 12 when she
testified at the trial to the abuse she had witnessed and then lost her
mother to prison for 15 years.

Samaria moved between
foster homes and then to the streets. She dropped out of school in ninth
grade, worked odd jobs, cleaning and doing clerical work, and had four
children, the youngest of whom was Tamir.

She got
tutors for her children, managed to get the oldest through high school
and the others on track to finish. Tamir had swimming and soccer lessons
and “Iron Man” DVDs. He had suffered such separation anxiety that she
had to send him to nursery school with a picture of herself so he would
know he would see her again.

On the afternoon of Nov.
22, 2014, a Saturday, she let Tamir and his sister Tajai go to the
recreation center by the park across the street before dinner. She was
starting the lasagna when there was a knock at the door. Two children
told her that Tamir had been shot. She didn’t believe them. “No, not my
kids,” she told them. “My kids are in the park.” A neighbor boy had let
Tamir play with his pellet gun without her knowing it. “I hadn’t seen
the gun before,” she told me. “They knew better than to let me see it.”

When
she arrived, the officers would not let her near her son to comfort him
as he lay bleeding on the ground, she said. They told her they would
put her in the squad car if she didn’t stay back.

As in
the majority of the 21st-century cases of police shootings in the
North, no one was prosecuted in the death of Tamir Rice. Late last
December, a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed him.
Decades ago, in the Jim Crow South, Emmett Till’s killers were acquitted
by an all-white jury, but at least they had gone to trial.

I
asked Michael Petty, Tamir’s great-uncle and a retired chaplain’s
assistant in the Navy, how Millie, his mother, would have borne what
happened to the great-grandson she never lived to see, in the place she
traveled so far to reach. It would have crushed her, Mr. Petty said. “My
mother would have carried that hurt,” he said, “and felt the pain of
the generations.”

Isabel Wilkerson is the author of
“The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”
and a former New York Times correspondent.

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12) At Success Academy School, a Stumble in Math and a Teacher’s Anger on Video

In
the video, a first-grade class sits cross-legged in a circle on a
brightly colored rug. One of the girls has been asked to explain to the
class how she solved a math problem, but she has gotten confused.

She begins to count: “One… two…” Then she pauses and looks at the teacher.

The
teacher takes the girl’s paper and rips it in half. “Go to the
calm-down chair and sit,” she orders the girl, her voice rising sharply.

“There’s nothing that infuriates me more than when you don’t do what’s on your paper,” she says, as the girl retreats.

The teacher in the video, Charlotte Dial, works at a Success Academy charter school
in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. She has been considered so effective that the
network promoted her last year to being a model teacher, who helps
train her colleagues.After sending the girl out of the circle and having
another child demonstrate how to solve the problem, Ms. Dial again
chastises her, saying, “You’re confusing everybody.” She then proclaims
herself “very upset and very disappointed.”

The video was
recorded surreptitiously in the fall of 2014 by an assistant teacher who
was concerned by what she described as Ms. Dial’s daily harsh treatment
of the children. The assistant teacher, who insisted on anonymity
because she feared endangering future job prospects, shared the video
with The New York Times after she left Success in November.

After
being shown the video last month, Ann Powell, a Success spokeswoman,
described its contents as shocking and said Ms. Dial had been suspended
pending an investigation. But a week and a half later, Ms. Dial returned
to her classroom and her role as an exemplar within the network.

Success’s own training materials, provided by the network’s leader, Eva S. Moskowitz,
say that teachers should never yell at children, “use a sarcastic,
frustrated tone,” “give consequences intended to shame children,” or
“speak to a child in a way they wouldn’t in front of the child’s
parents.”

But
interviews with 20 current and former Success teachers suggest that
while Ms. Dial’s behavior might be extreme, much of it is not uncommon
within the network.

Success is known for its students’ high achievement on state tests,
and it emphasizes getting — and keeping — scores up. Jessica Reid
Sliwerski, 34, worked at Success Academy Harlem 1 and Success Academy
Harlem 2 from 2008 to 2011, first as a teacher and then as an assistant
principal. She said that, starting in third grade, when children begin
taking the state exams, embarrassing or belittling children for work
seen as slipshod was a regular occurrence, and in some cases encouraged
by network leaders.

“It’s this culture of, ‘If you’ve made them cry, you’ve succeeded in getting your point across,’” she said.

One
day, she said, she found herself taking a toy away from a boy who was
playing with it in class, and then smashing it underfoot. Shortly after,
she resigned.

“I felt sick about the teacher I had become, and I
no longer wanted to be part of an organization where adults could so
easily demean children under the guise of ‘achievement,’” said Ms.
Sliwerski, who subsequently worked as an instructional coach in
Department of Education schools.

Some parents had another view.
Clayton Harding, whose son, currently in fourth grade, had Ms. Dial as a
soccer coach, said: “Was that one teacher over the line for 60 seconds?
Yeah. Do I want that teacher removed? Not at all. Not because of that.
Now if you tell me that happens every single day, that’s a different
thing. But no one is telling me that, and everyone is telling me about
all the amazing things that she does all the other days.”

The
mother of the girl in the video, in emails to The Times, initially
supported the school and asked that the video not be published, citing
her daughter’s privacy. After the network said that Ms. Dial would
return to the classroom, she said she was unhappy with the school, but
declined to talk further.

Ms. Dial did not respond directly to
requests for comment, but gave a statement through the school, saying,
“I’m deeply committed to the children and families of our school, and
I’m sorry for my lapse in emotional control 15 months ago. As I tell my
scholars to do, I will learn from this mistake and be a better teacher
for it.”

Ms. Moskowitz said in an interview and a subsequent
email that Ms. Dial’s behavior did not match Success’s educational
philosophy, but she also called her “a wonderful and committed teacher”
and said she had lost her cool because she “so desperately wants her
kids to succeed and to fulfill their potential.”

She said Ms. Dial had been reprimanded and had received training in how to be more aware of her emotions and manage them.

She
said it was possible that some teachers — “I think it’s really a
handful of people” — had misinterpreted the network’s philosophy and
that, out of an abundance of caution, the network would provide
additional training to all its teachers in the importance of tone in
speaking to students.

Still, Ms. Moskowitz said the video was not
indicative of any wider problem, and she questioned the motives of the
assistant teacher who recorded it.

“This video proves utterly
nothing but that a teacher in one of our 700 classrooms, on a day more
than a year ago, got frustrated and spoke harshly to her students,” she
wrote in her email.

But Joseph P. McDonald, a professor of
teaching and learning at New York University’s school of education, who
viewed the video at The New York Times’s request, described Ms. Dial’s
behavior as “abusive teaching.”

“We don’t see enough here to know
for sure that this classroom is typically full of fear, but I bet that
it is,” he wrote in an email. “The fear is likely not only about whether
my teacher may at any time erupt with anger and punish me dramatically,
but also whether I can ever be safe making mistakes.”

Indeed,
several of the current and former staff members interviewed said that
the network’s culture encouraged teachers to make students fear them in
order to motivate them. Carly Ginsberg, 22, who taught for about six
months last year at Success Academy Prospect Heights, said teachers
ripped up the papers of children as young as kindergarten as the
principal or assistant principal watched. She once witnessed a girl’s
humiliation as the principal mocked her low test score to another adult
in front of the child.In one instance, the lead kindergarten teacher in
her classroom made a girl who had stumbled reciting a math problem cry
so hard that she vomited. Ms. Ginsberg resigned in December because she
was so uncomfortable with the school’s approach. “It felt like I was
witnessing child abuse,” she said, adding, “If this were my kindergarten
experience, I would be traumatized.” She is now teaching in Los
Angeles.

Five of the teachers interviewed, including Ms.
Sliwerski, described leaders at multiple Success schools and a Success
supervisor in the teacher training program that the network runs with
Touro College endorsing the practice of ripping up work if it was deemed
not to reflect sufficient effort. The purpose, they said, was to get
students’ attention and demonstrate urgency.

At some schools,
there was even a term for it. “It was ‘rip and redo,’” Ayanna Legros,
who taught at Success Academy Harlem 1 for about seven months in the
2013-14 school year, said. “It’s embarrassing” for students, she said,
“so the idea is that you won’t want to ever have that moment again in
the classroom.” She is now teaching part time while in graduate school.

Ms.
Powell, the Success spokeswoman, pointed out that Ms. Sliwerski had
left the network five years ago, midyear, and that both Ms. Ginsberg and
Ms. Legros had also left midyear after only about six months. Ms.
Powell also said that the principal of the Prospect Heights school could
not respond on short notice to Ms. Ginsberg’s allegations.

Ms.
Moskowitz insisted that she had never seen a Success teacher rip up a
child’s paper, though she was in schools “3-5 hours a week.”

As
to making children cry, Ms. Moskowitz said that no one at Success
purposefully reduced children to tears, but that “children cry a lot”
and a child crying did not necessarily mean that a teacher had done
something wrong. “Olympic athletes, when they don’t do well, they
sometimes cry,” she said in a talk at New York Law School last month. “It’s not the end of the world.”

Ms.
Moskowitz repeatedly described the former assistant teacher as
“unethical” for not sharing the video with the school’s principal, Kerri
Nicholls, at the time she took it. Ms. Moskowitz said that the network
had shown itself to be “very quick to investigate” when such matters
were brought to its attention, as when a principal at one of its schools
created a “Got to Go” list of difficult children whom he wanted to leave the school.

But
the assistant teacher said that, because Ms. Nicholls had made it clear
that Ms. Dial was a favorite of hers, she did not think raising her
concerns would have any effect other than to possibly imperil her own
job. Success teachers are not unionized and can be fired at will.

Around
the same time that she took the video, the assistant teacher said, she
saw Ms. Dial become frustrated with a girl who was playing with her
hair. She said Ms. Dial proceeded to pull the girl’s hair into a
ponytail in a manner that she perceived as rough. She shared her
concerns with another staff member, who in turn told Ms. Nicholls. Ms.
Nicholls called the assistant teacher in for a meeting, but seemed more
annoyed at her than concerned about Ms. Dial’s behavior, the assistant
teacher said.

Ms. Nicholls said in an interview that after
investigating the incident she had found “nothing inappropriate aside
from” the assistant teacher’s “lack of reporting her concerns.”

Dr. McDonald, the N.Y.U. professor, who also sits on the board of the Great Oaks Charter School on the Lower East Side, said that the behavior in the video violated an important principle of schooling.

“Because
the child’s learning was still a little fragile — as learning always is
initially — she made an error,” he said in his email. “Good classrooms
(and schools) are places where error is regarded as a necessary
byproduct of learning, and an opportunity for growth. But not here.
Making an error here is a social offense. It confuses others — as if
deliberately.”

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday plans to complete an agreement with Cuba that will allow scheduled commercial flights to resume this year between the United States and the island nation for the first time in more than 50 years.

The
agreement, based on an understanding reached in December between the
two governments, will allow American air carriers to offer 20 flights
per day to Havana
and 10 to each of the nine other Cuban cities with international
airports. That is a substantial increase from the 10 to 15 charter
flights currently available between the United States and Cuba.

Anthony
Foxx, the transportation secretary, and Charles H. Rivkin, the top
State Department official for business and economics, will travel to
Havana on Tuesday to sign the pact. The agreement represents the latest
progress in President Obama’s
push to end decades of Cold War estrangement and begin to normalize
relations between the two countries.American air carriers will have 15
days to apply to the Department of Transportation for permits to offer
the flights, and officials said they expected to decide by the summer
which airlines could operate services from which cities.

Cuban
carriers are unlikely to offer flights to the United States, the
officials said, because they would have to obtain special licenses from
the American government, and their planes could be subject to seizure
based on civil lawsuits filed against Cuba in American courts.

“The
world economy has to do with what is going on with the Chinese economy,
ob-vious-ly,” Ms. Legarreta, the host of the popular morning program
“Hoy,” said, knowingly drawing out the last few syllables.

With growth slowing in China, she added, “this generates nervousness in the whole world.”

Her co-host, Raúl Araiza, chimed in: “One of the effects in Mexico is that the dollar costs just a bit more than it did.”

Never
fear, Ms. Legaretta answered: “Just because the dollar goes up, that
doesn’t mean the price of everything we buy goes up. Do you want to know
why?”Then she muddled through an explanation of exchange rates and
cheaper exports, only to trail off with an admission that she was still
confused. But in the end, Ms. Legaretta and Mr. Araiza agreed, Mexicans
should not worry about the tumbling peso unless they hanker for
expensive imports.

But
her breathless introduction to economics did nothing to soothe Mexican
consumers’ worries: The peso has fallen more than 30 percent against the
dollar over the past year, with an especially sharp drop this week.

In Mexico, where currency collapses have led to triple-digit inflation and deep recessions, the peso’s tumble creates rising anxiety.

“For
many generations in Mexico, a weaker peso has generally been associated
with a crisis,” said Alonso Cervera, the managing director for Latin
America economics at Credit Suisse. “Not everyone understands that the
causes are external.”

One of those causes is the fall in oil
prices, which saps market confidence in oil exporters like Mexico. The
government here relies on oil revenues to finance part of the budget,
and the price drop has already forced budget cuts. Last week the
president of the central bank, Agustín Carstens, insisted that more
cutbacks were needed to avoid “a much longer and more painful adjustment
process.”

Still, analysts say the economy is better protected
than in the past. Public debt is manageable and the central bank sits on
healthy foreign reserves. Unlike many of the emerging market economies
that have also watched their currencies struggle against the dollar,
Mexico’s economy grew a modest 2.5 percent last year, and is expected to
grow again this year.

“There are many forces at play and it is
very difficult to disentangle them,” said Gabriel Lozano, the chief
Mexico economist for J.P. Morgan, who argues that the Mexican economy
shows many signs of strength. “You have a lot of buffers.”

But
public jitters can cause consumers to delay purchases and investments,
putting brakes on the economy. To stave that off, officials have
struggled to find the right language to project calm.

“It’s a
fact that we’re experiencing a moment of great uncertainty and
volatility in the capital markets,” Mexico’s finance secretary, Luis
Videgaray, said in a recent radio interview. “In the face of that,
governments have to act like the Mexican government has been doing, with
full responsibility, with early measures to protect economic stability
and that way protect the most important thing — which is to protect the
economy of Mexican families.”

The greatest worry is that a weaker peso will generate inflation as higher import prices are passed on to consumers.

The Mexican economy’s link to the United States is among the strongest in the world, with almost $1.5 billion in trade crossing back and forth across the border every day.

That means wherever one looks here, the effect of higher-priced American products is creeping in.

“The
price of apples went up from one day to the next,” said Moi Gregorio,
33, the manager of a juice stand in Mexico City who blends apples from
Washington State with other fruits grown in Mexico into his fresh
juices. “If the price of the dollar stays like this, I won’t have any
choice but to raise the price.”

For now, merchants are swallowing
the cost increases. “The price of chicken has been going up every day
since September,” said Edgar Hernández, 35, manager at a market counter
that sells fresh poultry.

The price of cotton imported
from the United States is a problem for LeRoy Laboratories, a national
company that makes bandages and other medical supplies, said Armando
Lezama Laguerenne, 48, who works in sales and training for the company.

Rather
than pass on the full price increase to consumers, the company is
trying to reduce costs and raise productivity, even if that means
cutting some jobs, he said.

And a cheaper currency is a blessing to some parts of the economy, like tourism. Other services are prospering, too.

“I
have been drawing up budgets for foreigners nonstop” since the fall,
said Carlos Llergo, a producer for Arre Lulú, which provides production
services for companies that shoot advertisements in Mexico.

“Even
when the peso wasn’t so cheap, they came for the locations or the
well-qualified technicians,” Mr. Llergo said. “Now that it’s cheaper and
they make more money, they are in heaven.”

Avelino Rodríguez,
managing partner for The Lift, another production services company, said
that the cost of shooting a Corona beer ad recently was 10 percent
under budget because of the peso’s fall.

But a cheap peso on its
own is not enough to assure business, he said. Spain, Portugal, South
Africa, Argentina and Brazil are all competitors — and their currencies
have fallen, too.

One of Mexico’s most successful industries faces a similar challenge.

“Yes,
we are more competitive, but so are all the emerging markets that make
auto parts,” said Oscar Albin, the executive president of the National
Autoparts Industry.

Mexican factories sold some $85 billion in
parts last year. “If we all have the same advantage, then it stops being
an advantage,” he said.

On top of that, many components, like steel, plastic and fabric for seats, are priced in dollars.

It is not just pricing that has given Mexico an edge, Mr. Albin said, “It’s the productivity that makes us competitive.”

Experts
have long known that rich people generally live longer than poor
people. But a growing body of data shows a more disturbing pattern:
Despite big advances in medicine, technology and education, the
longevity gap between high-income and low-income Americans has been
widening sharply.

The poor are losing ground not only in income,
but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the
early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder
could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the
bottom half, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration. Fast-forward to 2001, and he could expect to live 5.8 years longer than his poorer counterpart.

New research released on Friday contains even more jarring numbers. Looking at the extreme ends of the income spectrum, economists at the Brookings Institution
found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in
life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10
percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to
14 years.

For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years.

“There has been this huge spreading out,” said Gary Burtless, one of the authors of the study.

The
growing chasm is alarming policy makers, and has surfaced in the
presidential campaign. During the Democratic debate Thursday, Senator
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton expressed concern over shortening life spans for some Americans.

The
causes are still being investigated, but public health researchers say
that deep declines in smoking among the affluent and educated may partly
explain the difference.

Over all, according to the Brookings
study, life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent of wage earners
improved by just 3 percent for men born in 1950 compared with those born
in 1920. For the top 10 percent, though, it jumped by about 28 percent.
(The researchers used a common measure — life expectancy at age 50 —
and included data from 1984 to 2012.)

It is hard to point to one
overriding cause, but public health researchers have a few answers. In
recent decades, smoking, the single biggest cause of preventable death,
has helped drive the disparity, said Andrew Fenelon, a researcher at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the rich and educated
began to drop the habit, its deadly effects fell increasingly on poorer,
uneducated people. Mr. Fenelon has calculated that smoking
accounted for a third to a fifth of the gap in life expectancy between
men with college degrees and men with only high school degrees. For
women it was as much as a quarter.

At
the heart of the disparity, said Elizabeth H. Bradley, a professor of
public health at Yale, are economic and social inequities, “and those
are things that high-tech medicine cannot fix.”

Life expectancy
for the bottom 10 percent of male wage earners born in 1920 was 72.9,
compared with 73.6 for those born in 1950, the Brookings researchers
found. For the top 10 percent, life expectancy jumped to 87.2 from 79.1.

The growing longevity gap means that benefits like Social Security
are paid out even more disproportionately to the better-off because
they are around for more years to collect them. Last summer, the
National Academy of Sciences convened a panel of experts to study the implications. It concluded that disparate life expectancies are making the country’s biggest entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, increasingly unfair to the poor and suggested officials consider policy changes to address the problem.

Poor
health outcomes for low-income Americans have dragged the United States
down to some of the lowest rankings of life expectancy among rich
countries. The Social Security Administration found,
for example, that life expectancy for the wealthiest American men at
age 60 was just below the rates in Iceland and Japan, two countries
where people live the longest. Americans in the bottom quarter of the
wage scale, however, ranked much further down — one notch above Poland
and the Czech Republic.

Many
researchers believe the gap in life spans from lower- to upper-income
Americans started widening about 40 years ago, when income inequality
began to grow. Earlier in the 20th century, trends in life spans were of
declining disparities, some experts say, because improvements in public
health, such as the invention of the polio vaccine and improved sanitation, benefited rich and poor alike. The broad adoption of medication for high blood pressure in the 1950s led to a major improvement for black men, erasing a big part of the gap with whites, said Dana P. Goldman,
the director of the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and
Economics at the University of Southern California. But medical
improvements can also drive disparity when they disproportionately
benefit affluent Americans; for example, cutting-edge cancer treatments.

The
experience of other countries suggests that disparities do not
necessarily get worse in contemporary times. Consider Canada, where men
in the poorest urban neighborhoods experienced the biggest declines in
mortality from heart disease from 1971 to 1996, according to a 2002 study. Over all, the gap in life expectancy at birth between income groups declined in Canada during that period. And a study comparing cancer survival rates
found that low-income residents of Toronto had greater survival rates
than their counterparts in Detroit. There was no difference for middle-
and high-income residents in the two cities.

“There are large
swaths of the population that are not enjoying the pretty impressive
gains the rest of us are having in life spans,” said Christopher J. L.
Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in
Seattle. “Not everybody is sharing in the same prosperity and progress.”

An autopsy report shows that a black man shot dead by the San Francisco
police had 20 gunshot wounds, including six in the back, and had drugs
in his system when he died in a shooting that set off protests and calls
for the chief’s removal. The San Francisco coroner’s report released
Thursday showed that the man, Mario Woods, 26, had two gunshot wounds in
his buttocks and others to his head, legs, abdomen and hands. Some of
the wounds could have been from the same bullet, the autopsy said. It
also showed that he had used methamphetamine, marijuana, antidepressants
and cough medicine before he was shot. Investigators have said Mr.
Woods ignored orders to drop a knife before five officers opened fire on
Dec. 2. The shooting was captured on video and circulated widely online, igniting protests over police tactics. Multiple agencies are investigating.

JACKSONVILLE,
Fla. — As the safety crisis surrounding Takata’s airbags that are prone
to rupture has mushroomed, the Japanese auto supplier has insisted that
the propellant in its airbags is safe.

But on Friday, testimony
in a Florida court showed that Takata’s own engineers discarded evidence
that may have shown otherwise as long as 16 years ago. As early as
2000, around the time the propellant, which includes a compound called
ammonium nitrate, was introduced into Takata models, failures occurred
during internal testing.

But Takata altered its test data to hide
the failures from its biggest customer, Honda, and a senior Takata
executive ordered some of the evidence be discarded, the testimony
said.Thomas Sheridan, a former Takata airbag engineer, was questioned
this year as part of a lawsuit brought by a Florida woman who was
paralyzed after her Takata airbag deployed too forcefully during an
accident in her 2001 Honda Civic in June 2014. On Friday, her lawyers disclosed the testimony during a hearing over what evidence should be allowed at trial.

Mr.
Sheridan said in his deposition that he had tried to examine airbag
parts that had failed a series of performance tests included in a June
2000 report to Honda Motor.

But he said that he had found the
parts had been discarded under orders from Takata’s vice president for
engineering at the time, Al Bernat. Mr. Bernat has also been tied to a
series of airbag tests in 2004, in which former Takata test engineers
have said that evidence was also discarded.

“I had the data but I
wanted to go look for those parts,” Mr. Sheridan was quoted as saying
in the deposition. “But when I went to look for the parts, because some
of the parts had come apart, they were no longer available. They had
been discarded.”

Takata declined a request for an interview with
Mr. Bernat, who still works for the company. A company spokesman said it
“believes that the lawsuit is without merit and intends to defend
itself vigorously.”

Takata did not report the failures to Honda,
according to court documents. Instead, it manipulated data to hide
results that showed the propellant could combust violently, causing its
casing — called an inflater — to overpressurize and rupture, according
to the documents. In several instances, “pressure vessel failures,” or
airbag ruptures, were reported to Honda as normal airbag deployments,
the documents said.

“I think this was a complete breakdown of the
entire organization to provide a safe product,” Mr. Sheridan said in
his deposition.

Asked whether he was surprised that Takata airbags had since been linked to deaths and injuries, he responded no.

“I didn’t think it would take so long for the failures to show up,” he said. “It took a lot longer than I thought.”

Takata’s
airbag inflaters, which can overpressurize and explode when they
deploy, shooting metal shards at passengers, have been linked to 10
deaths, including one last month, and over 100 injuries.

Takata
has sold as many as 54 million metal inflaters in the United States. So
far, 14 automakers have recalled about 28 million inflaters in 24
million vehicles across the nation. Ammonium nitrate is sensitive to
high temperatures and moisture, and can become unstable over time.

Allan
Kam, a safety expert who worked for the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration from 1975 to 2000, called Takata’s supposed disposal of
evidence and data manipulation “unbelievable.”

“From a public
safety standpoint, it’s deplorable behavior,” Mr. Kam said. “If it were
just a cosmetic thing, it would be deplorable behavior. But people could
get maimed and killed by this defect.”

On Nov. 3, safety
regulators fined Takata $70 million for failing to promptly disclose
defects in its airbags, and accused the company of manipulating test
data, a penalty that could grow by $130 million if the company does not
live up to its agreement with the agency.

The same day, Honda
Motor dropped Takata as its airbag supplier, concluding that the
company, its longtime partner, had misrepresented and manipulated test
data.

Ted Leopold, the lawyer for the Florida woman, Patricia
Mincey, presented examples of Takata engineers in both Japan and the
United States seemingly manipulating data over years.

In one
report on airbag tests, dated 2007 and also prepared for Honda, five of
nine data points that appeared in Takata’s original data were not
included in the version submitted to Honda, according to the court
documents.

Chris Martin, a Honda spokesman, reiterated that the
automaker was “aware of evidence that suggests that Takata
misrepresented and manipulated test data.”

The hearing, a
pretrial session, was not meant to weigh the facts, but to decide on its
admissibility as evidence as part of Ms. Mincey’s demand for damages.

The
case is unusual in that it involves an airbag the plaintiff argues
aggressively deployed, rather than ruptured, but for the same reasons as
a rupture.

Takata has fought the accusations, which could open it up to a far wider universe of plaintiffs than just victims of ruptures.

In
fact, tests conducted on the particular inflater model in the 2001
Honda Civic had so far shown no signs of rupturing, said David M.
Bernick, a lawyer representing Takata.

“None of them have
ruptured, zero,” he said. “We have no evidence, in fact we have evidence
to the contrary, that this inflater was defective at the time of the
accident.”

Takata lawyers also argued that the company had been
proactive in trying to address potential safety problems as they arose,
something that they said was not reflected in the evidence presented by
Mr. Leopold.

Judge James H. Daniel of Duval County Court agreed
with Takata that there was not enough evidence linking Takata’s actions
directly with Ms. Mincey’s accident and injuries. But he said he was
open to considering more evidence, which Mr. Leopold said he would
provide.

Still, safety advocates found it disturbing that Takata
might have known about potential problems years ago, but not immediately
reported them to customers, automakers and safety regulators.

“It’s very damning,” said Rosemary Shahan, founder of Consumers for Auto Reliability.

“It’s bad enough to have a faulty product, it’s even worse to cover it up.”

Hiroko Tabuchi reported from Jacksonville, Fla., and Danielle Ivory from New York.